Material displacement looks jaggy
polycounter lvl 4
Trying to get displacement working for materials, but the result is very jagged/messy. I've tried all sorts of different values for the tessellation multiplier and world displacement, yet the results are still poor. The preview looks good. I tested it on a plane and cube with plenty of vertices but the result seems the same as if applied to a plane with no extra vertices.
Replies
This next image shows the same shape with some slope applied:
these were captured in Substance Designer, using the same tessellation setting. On the first picture we can see similar artifacts to yours.
This issue is similar to how normal map behaves with 90 degrees angles elements when the lowpoly representation is a plane compared to the detail (from polycount wiki)
What you are doing is also a very wasteful use of displacement. You could take a plane, put it in Max or Maya or whatever, apply the displacement map, protect the vertex normals to keep the plane normals, apply some optimization, and use that as a modular lowpoly piece.
Apply the displacement, make sure the normals are still protected so it shows the normals of the non displaced plane. This is important so your normal map will work correctly!
Apply some automatic optimization and make sure you still have the protected normals. Whoila:
From 20k we went down to a few hundreds of faces and you have a mesh that works with your normal map and doesn't need tessellation. But... You will always get some of those artifacts with displacement because simply those heavy angles doesn't have enough resolution or geometry or pixel density because of the stretching. Making the edges of the slope beveled too helps more but sharp edges will never work unless you go crazy high with the poly count. Which I don't think its any good even for a portfolio piece. Because then It would show that you can do it only this inefficient way. Its just better to model them and uv them out properly at the first place. In my personal opinion, those crazy tessellated substance materials are very misleading in general, unless otherwise it looks very pro. Many people started using displacement in wrong ways and they think its normal to have everything tessellated. In your case for example , instead of doing the trick I've shown you could have a plane with low poly cylinders laid out on it. That'd be the real way to do it. Thats how it would be actually done in a real game. Or worse yet, just a plane with normals depending on how close it can be seen.