Tessellation in HDRP

Adding tessellation is a great way to bring a flat, 2D image to life. Let’s experiment with creating a cobblestone floor.

Here’s a nice looking wood floor from the sample scene of a new HDRP Unity 2020.3 project:

And here’s what it will look like after applying our new cobblestone material with tessellation added:

We’re going to be using the amazing textures available for free at polyhaven.com. We’ll use Cobblestone Floor 08:

Use the Download button in the upper-right corner. Once the download is complete, extract it, then drag and drop the textures folder into your Unity project:

Create a new Material:

Drag and drop the new material onto our surface:

Set the Material Shader to LitTessellation

Change Displacement Mode, Tessellation Factor, set the Base Map to the diff file, the Mask Map to the the rough file, Normal Map to nor file, and Height Map to disp file, and change the Parametrization to Amplitude:

Add some fine tuning to Metallic Remapping and Smoothness Remapping:

And here’s our beautiful new floor up-close and personal: