Dev Stuff | Using Tesselation (Patreon)

I've often had a bit of an issue with some close-up shots in Demon's Soulbound. The models are around mid-tier when it comes to their polygon/tri count, and often, hard edges could be seen in cutscenes when zooming in on certain body parts. This is usually only a problem in zoomed-in views.

Here's an example -- the sharp triangles on Officer Fielding's heel:

If I were to use even higher-poly models, it'd really do a number on performance and file size. So ideally, it'd be nice to be able to smooth out hard corners like these for close-up cutscene shots. And the answer seems to be tesselation. Real-time tesselation subdivides the model mesh on a shader basis and can do geometry manipulation that way, adding more details, or smoothing. For me, smoothing is what I'd like to have.

This is the result:

The officer's heel is nice'n round now.

The only drawback with this method for me is the loss of some performance, but since it will usually be only used in the cutscenes, gameplay isn't affected by this. It seems like a pretty good solution.