Quote:
Tessellation is the tiling of textures
Actually this is wrong. Tesselation refers to breaking a 3D surface into multiple polygons. Texture tiling has nothing to do with it (the compiler may actually tesselate along texture tile edges, but this is incedental).
In WED, when a surface is tesselated, this is done for several reasons.. first it is needed for breaking the blocks up into a form that can be processed by the BSP compiler.
Also, tesselation is needed for vertex lighting..dynamic lighting and such (unless you use shaders) can only be as good as the number of vertices you have.. tesselating a large block into many small polygons increases vertex count, giving you higher quality dynamic lighting.
There may also be a need for tesselation for lightmaping purposes, but i dont know exactly how this may work.
Tesselation can aso be done dynamically in D3D for breaking down higher-order surfaces (NURBS, etc..) into polygons. A6 doesnt suport these surfaces though...
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