If you’ve been keeping up with OpenGL 4.x, then you’ve no doubt heard of the new Tessellation features they’ve added. Available in DirectX for a few versions now, it’s finally come to OpenGL and offers up some great new features for automatic tessellation and geometry processing. A new tutorial online shows some example code and techniques behind the new systems, and offers up lots of details along the way.
Let’s take a look at how Tessellation has been implemented in the graphics pipeline. The core components that are responsible for Tessellation are two new shader stages and in between them a fixed function stage that can be configured to some degree but does not run a shader. The first shader stage is called Tessellation Control Shader (TCS), the fixed function stage is called the Primitive Generator (PG), and the second shader stage is called Tessellation Evaluation Shader (TES).
They show lots of code but also get into the details of barycentric coordinates, displacement maps, textured surfaces, and much more. Get it all at the link below.
They show lots of code but also get into the details of barycentric
coordinates, displacement maps, textured surfaces, and much more. Get
it all at the link below.