While we're at it, here some more ideas for the displacement. Might require some core work but nonetheless, I think they're worth considering.
-
Per-material choice of screen-space or scene-unit-dsp +values.
-Scene unit (cm) displacement is not adaptive like the screen space displacement. Anything
out of frustum could be
decreased to save memory. The number of units should be changeable in a cascade box, opening when scene-unit-dsp is chosen.
-
Auto bump/Auto normal (quite obvious), Parallax Mapping (with
silhouettes) would be cool .
-Something unusual:
Focus picked area for higher divisions(a fall-off would be good)/ decreasing the subdivisions of areas out-of-focus. User-driven, of course. Together with auto-bump, this could work very well and also allow fancy animations.
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GPU tessellation: Possible with an SDS object in versions that support open-subdiv. The limit is usually 64 steps but often more than enough for certain things(Some applications allow much higher amounts, though I'm not exactly sure how they work).
So, let the GPU handle the subdivisions and be one step closer towards being a hybrid.