Thanks for your explanation. When you say an evenly tessellated surface, would that be a surface that I've manually subdivided? I'm a little new to all this.
A 'height map' is just a name given to a black and white map which is being used to convey height information. For hard surface they're normally only used with parallax shaders, and for organics they're used with either parallax or to offset vertices together with tessellation.
Tesselation and displacement are bad for hard surface mechanical objects. They just can't hold edges as efficiently as proper modeling. For this kind of thing just adding extra polygons gives a better and more efficient result. Tesselation is better for things like rocks or bumpy ground textures.
Yes, for any kind of displacement you need to make regularly tessellated mesh sometimes adding extra loops manually where they are not absolutely necessary shape wise . Not just two big triangles for a sides of your tunnel or that vent shield . But anyway you would see those zigzags until it's really lots of geo so it's…
I never worked with Unity beyond some little testing but from this small citation they refer to so called parallax mapping which makes kind of several layers/slices , totally in 2d and each slice getting certain UV shift based on texels height values. It creates a kind of depth illusion. It doesn't depend on polycount at…
I've been prototyping a game/level idea in Unity, and have been using square planes with only a single polygon (or two triangles I guess) along with various materials I'm creating in substance designer. I think I'm getting it to look fairly decent. Here's an example for one of the little hallway experiments: However I've…