Tamy Boubekeur and Marc Alexa presented a new algorithm called “Phone Tessellation” at SIGGRAPH Asia 2008, and have now release a windows demo of the algorithm in use for you to see for yourself. From their own description:
Modern 3D engines used in real-time applications provide shading that hides the lack of higher order continuity inside the shapes using modulated normals, textures, and tone-mapping — artifacts remain only on interior contours and silhouettes if the surface geometry is not smooth. The basic idea in this paper is to apply a purely local refinement strategy that inflates the geometry enough to avoid these artifacts. Our technique is a geometric version of Phong normal interpolation, not applied on normals but on the vertex positions. We call this strategy Phong Tessellation.
Demos, Whitepapers, and Psuedocode are available online.
via Phong Tessellation.
This technology should be given a lot more attention. Tessellation techniques like DX11’s adaptive tessellation wastes polygons.
http://www.geeks3d.com/public/jegx/201002/d3d11_tessellation_factor_5.jpg
Variations to the height of a surface are not noticable when the surface is facing the camera. Detail/adaptive tessellation could easily be optimized by using a normal map’s view-transformed Z value as an input weight for tessellation density.