Tessellation in HDRP

Simple Guide to using Tessellation in Unity!

What is Tesselation?

Tessellation is a type of material that takes the mesh it is on and displaces it according to its heightmap.

Setup

On your material, we need to change its shader type to HDRP > LitTessellation.

It will give us a Tesselation section which provides various options to mess around with the displacement.

Go to Displacement Mode and change it to “Tessellation Displacement.” It will sub-divide the surface into many vertices, allowing the heightmap control the height and depth of the mesh.

A note to add, we need to make sure that we have a heightmap for this to work. Go to my last blog to see how I created one for my texture.

Under Heightmaps, we can adjust the “Amplitude” option to increase or lower the heightmap. You will see that the whitest point in the heightmap elevates and the blackest point lowers.

You can of course adjust the tessellation factor to increase its vertices for more details.

Unlike the pixel, and vertex displacement, the plane is no longer flat and it allows for a more organic and realistic look.

Be aware that this could become very expensive for your project. Use it on areas that are small and important.

Gabriel