Transferring height map / tesselation details to mesh?

armagon

I'm currently working with a limited game engine that does not support realtime tessellation for surfaces. This means that most of my rocks and other nature materials are looking very flat compared to what they looked like in UE4 and CryEngine. Does anyone know any technique of transferring details to the mesh? Like, having a plane or simpler rock surface and baking the tesselation to the mesh itself? 

armagon

I'm using Blender. Thanks, i'll try the displacement modifier!

Obscura

Bake a normal map.

armagon

A normal map will keep my mesh simple. I want to enrich the geometry with the heightmap, just like normal tessellation does.

EarthQuake

If you know your engine doesn't support tessellation/displacement, why not simply model the low poly with more detail? Brute force tessellation isn't a very efficient way to approach this.

armagon

I don't want to redo all assets.

gnoop

I would try subdivide > displace > decimate (planar with UV's)  > data transfer to project vertex normals from initial model to a new one so it would be matching initial normal map.    

But I never tried it myself in Blender.  Not sure the data transfer would cope with normals properly and you wouldn't have to bake normal maps again.    Blender data transfer is not as reliable as Max projection modifier, normal theft script or Maya attribute transfer  imo.    But in theory it should work.    For rocks at least.