Tessellation in the Unity HDRP Pipeline

In this article, we will discuss Unity’s HDRP/LitTessellation shader.

For our demo, I’ve used a cobblestone texture / material provided freely from polyhaven.com!

Check them out sometime, there is plenty to browse.

https://polyhaven.com/a/cobblestone_floor_001

As you can see, the albedo map is about what you would expect.
But how do we bring this flat texture to life?

Our friends at polyhaven have kindly provided us with a displacement texture as well.

We’ll use this as what Unity refers to as a “Height Map”.

Once you’ve added the cobblestone 001 pack to your project, you should have something that looks similar to this.

You shouldn’t see the last material though, the Cobblestone_tesselated file.

Create a new material in Unity and save it Cobblestone_tessellated as shown above.

Select the newly created material, change the shader to HDRP/LitTessellation, and apply the settings shown above.

Also assign the diff file as the Base Map, the disp file as the Height map, the nor file as the normal map, and the rough file as the Mask map.

Now create and position a plane game object in your scene.

Apply our newly created material to this plane.

Here we can add tint and play with the metallic and smoothness remapping to give our stone a more wet appearance.

The “Tesselation Factor” will determine just how pronounced the warp to our plane will be in Unity to create a non-flat surface out of our plane.

Enjoy!