Substance Designer and Tessalation

snake85027

I am watching some tutorials for substance designer and some of the artist use Tessellation in their view port and I wondered if this is bad practice or not? Doesn't tessellation of models slow down the rendering for game engines?

AdvisableRobin

Yes, generally you don't use tessellation in a game engine. But when it comes to material authoring it helps a ton to be able to see the actual displacement of the height, since the heightmap is the base of the entire material when working in Designer. So yes, it is good practice to use Designer's tessellation and displacement when you're building the material.

snake85027

Lets say you were going to bring in a substance into UE4. How would you go about getting the height of your map to pop like it does in substance? I exported my substance into UE4 and exported the Heightmap seperate because it seems it doesnt export. And this is what I have. Can you let me know if anything stands out.

snake85027

I guess I'm just getting frustrated. I see all these amazing substance but no one is showing them off in unreal. It's always marmoset. Which makes me believe that's those amazing results are not achievable in unreal. 

AtticusMars

You can get pretty extreme depth out of POM in Unreal. Check the parallax occlusion mapping level in the Unreal content samples.

snake85027

Thanks ill check that out.

snake85027

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hoT8fJJgoU

snake85027

a tutorial i found

AdvisableRobin

You'd have to create a material that utilizes Unreal's tessellation and displacement, in the sidebar of the material editor you can turn on tessellation and then you can input the heightmap into the world displacement slot. I'm sure if you search around you can find some examples of setting up a material like that in Unreal. People typically use Marmoset because it is significantly easier to use.

pixelquaternion

Sorry to necro a thread but since i almost spend the week reading and asking question about tessellation and real time rendering and i am going to give you my unbiased point of view.

First let me mention that i am working in the industry for the past 17 years and i spent 7 teaching 3D&2D  game design in various school here in the capital of video games Montreal.

Currently a lot of tutorials and assets are popping everywhere making heavy use of tessellation and they are not exactly what i would call honest with the people buying their stuff since of course they are trying to make a living.

After a lot of test from me and a few colleagues in  Unreal engine 4 we came to the conclusion that you simply cannot use more than a few assets(i mean very few) with tessellation without losing those fps big time. Using pom would be a better choice and even with pom you don't want to go crazy with it either since the tech is simply not there currently to support such heavy calculations.

I am currently working on a game and often using low res model of rock as an example with 3 levels of lod yield surprising good performance since most recent years video cards can push a lot more poly than the generation before.

So i hope this will shed a bit of light on the current state of tessellation and current assets workflow and my only intention here is to warn beginner developers so they don't fall paying hefty amount of money they often don't have as indies to stuff that will not work in real time rendering situation.

You can still use most assets and simply don't make use of the tessellation part and you will be fine.

Sorry for my bad English.