Direct3D Rendering Cookbook

Chapter 5. Applying Hardware Tessellation

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Preparing the vertex shader and buffers for tessellation
• Tessellating a triangle and quad
• Tessellating bicubic Bezier surfaces
• Refining meshes with Phong tessellation
• Optimizing tessellation through back-face culling and dynamic Level-of-Detail

Introduction

Tessellation is the process of tiling/dicing a plane with one or more geometric shapes, for example, the creation of mosaics. In Direct3D 11, this process refers to the division of geometry into smaller triangles according to an algorithm and a tessellation factor. Hardware tessellation is available in Shader Model 5.0 and, therefore, hardware must support a Direct3D feature level of 11_0 or higher.

When ...