On Friday at GDC I attended a session hosted by ATi on a tool they’ve developed for creating displacement maps from a high res mesh for use on a low res mesh. You can read more about the tool here:
http://developer.amd.com/gpu/MeshMapper/Pages/default.aspx
They applied this technique in a recent demo and were able to achieve some pretty good results in terms of the amount of geometry detail they could push. Here’s the demo:
http://developer.amd.com/documentation/videos/pages/froblins.aspx
This whole idea is a bit of a paradigm shift - kinda like the transition to using normal maps that everyone had to go through - so it’s going to take a bit of adjustment to get used to it. What I’m wondering is, has anyone actually tried this either in a personal or company project - and if so, how do you feel about it?
Even if you haven’t tried it, do you think this is the next big thing? Or is there some other tech that you know about that will get us to this level of geometry detail?