Tessellated surfaces

I think a neat feature to have would be the option to enable tessellation on prims with flat surfaces. I can think of many, many existing builds that would look so much better with the improved light rendering this would provide... pretty much any builds that have lighting and large prims.

Tessellation could be made to be enabled only with local lighting AND high object detail selected in preferences, and I can think of no way it could possibly break any existing builds.

This feature alone would be a huge step forward in making the world look better. Most of us who already have all graphics options cranked up can probably handle losing the 1-2 fps it should take to render all the extra triangles.

I think you'd better propose a method for moving the new vertices out of the plane, or your result will be every bit as boring as the original. Or did you just want to tesselate to be able to apply multiple texture tiles to a plane?

This might be another meshes thread, but not necessarily, I can see alternatives like alpha-driving. Is there any particular idea on the tip of your tongue?

Actually, alpha-driven tesselation would be extremely cool. Ie. pop a texture onto a planar side with its alpha mapped to the desired height profile (usually corresponding to the visible objects in the rest of the texture), set the height scaling and resolution sliders, then invoke alpha-driven tesselation (how? dunno).

Hey presto, what was a flat picture of cakes and tea on a table is now a 3D object with matching mesh and texturing.

Actually, I'm sure everone's spotted that it's not that easy. For a start, the 2D texture isn't holographic, lol, so you'd have to apply 6 (or at least 5) textures to a cube and apply it as a cubemap texture. It gets a bit complex. Maybe there's other solutions?

Interesting idea though. Needs a lot of chewing over.

OpenGL renders lighting much better on tessellated surfaces because it calculates the light across each surface by calculating only the vertices and subsequently applying a gradient light map to each triangle.

You can see this in action by creating a large sphere and a large cube next to each other. Now create a small (relative) light source and move it around near them. Notice how smooth the shading is on the sphere as compared to the cube and you may begin to understand what I'm getting at.

Another good example is my lit runway in southeast Abbotts at the ground level. Notice how the segments are lit oddly (diagonal "strips" of light) by the luminescent particles on the edges. With tessellated surfaces, the lighting will render much more accurately.

Yep, I see what you mean now. And since all the new polygons are all in the same plane, you can optimize the volume of coordinate data down by 3:2 as well, which may help a bit.

I'm pretty sure that that kind of thing is easy to do with pixel shaders nowadays without needing to tessellate though, and much more smoothly too since any fixed tessellation will look chunky when close up. Now that you've mentioned this, it'll trigger a bell next time I'm looking into that area.

More to think about ...