GPU tesselation / displacement in EEVEE
Hello, theres one important feature missing from EEVEE. And its "micro displacement". Obvioulsy gpu tesselation is not the exact same thing as microdisplacement in cycles , but the results are 99% the same ...
why do we need it ? becasue its
A) performance free , crysis 2 was the first game which used realtime gpu tesselation and displacement, and it looked badass and didnt tank on the performance.
B) its more important than even realtime raytracing , lightiung can always be faked to look good , raytracing i kind of overrated , but highpoly assets are dragging on the performance and are a lot of work to create.
With static assets thats already a problem , but with animated assets this becomes a huge bummer. Neither EEVEE nor blender itself is good at handling higpoly counts .. with gpu tesselation you can stop caring and work much easier with lowpoly assets and their (baked) displacement map.
C) create displacement based visual effects (like exploding/ripping flesh from ripping cloth ) with realtime preview and evaluation ( also as preview for cycles renders of microdisplacement effects)
D) create something like bark , ground etc. with lots of detail with ease and fast!
Most other benefits of microdisplacement in cycles and other raytracing renderers translates over to gpu tesseletaion , it even supports vector displacement.
I honestly think its more important than realtime raytracing BY FAR ...
thanx for listening
5 Comments
Not exactly the same thing as tessellation but POM is pretty efficient at what it does and can look as good when setuped right : blender.community/c/graphicall/frbbbc/
* @Shimoon * thanx i already bought that shader. and its pretty cool for many things , but now think of an animated character with spiky armor and tons of reliefs and ornaments on its armor, there it doesnt work and just flickers, metallic glossiness also looks off, its also very heavy on the pixelshaders while the tesselation hardware of your gpu just sits there unused
Want to use a software agnostic material library? Better crank that subdiv up to 6 and try not to crash with the displacement modifier!
It's insane how far behind Blender is when it comes to tessellation. Every other engine and tool has fully supported this for years.
One of the greatest advantages of Blender over game engines is that we can have film quality detail close up and often procedurally with micro displaced geometry (with noise or height maps), smooth bevels etc. But all of that comes to a crawl when applied to the whole world at distance. Even Cycles' Experimental adaptive subdiv dicing is not getting enough development attention for years. It is rather cumbersome to keep on disabling and re-enabling it, just to update the viewport, and not having it at all in Eevee. It would be very nice to have a global setting, even with some basic LOD decimate generation at a distance. Blender has all the foundations and algorithms for it. It would be a game changer for Blender.
What about adding adaptive subdivision to Eevee? Then you could just use the displace modifier to add your microdisplacement.