hi
I've created a tileable brick wall texture and I want to use
displacement to make the bricks stand out. I'm curious about how to
manage this without splitting the mesh edges? I've attached some images
to illustrate, and I've increased the displacement for clarity. Even
when I set it to a low displacement, the mesh still splits.


Replies
longer answer. mesh normals / uv seams affect behaviour
Most of the time you don't, a good normal map does wonders. Plus you can add individual low-res brick meshes here and there to emphasize edges.
Here's an older example that combines two tiled textures, plus a bit of lowpoly modeling.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/ModelingRubbleIntoAPath
if you were to soften all the edges on the original model it would probably do roughly what you want. it might look a bit weird in places.
In most cases you're better off just using real geometry - it'll go faster (assuming you lod/use nanite) and you don't have silly artefacts to work around.