Adjusting material complexity through quality switches

You are probably familiar with different quality settings if you've played computer games before. This doesn't happen very much on consoles, which are closed environments, but PC users often have to select between different quality presets to cater for their computer's specs. With the advent of cross-platform development, where the same project sees the light of day on multiple different devices, this need to adapt to the strengths of each device, has become more and more widespread. Not only that, but more often than not, those same devices can't support the same level of rendering features, so we need to take care of that too. You'll see how you can do this in the following pages!

Getting ready

The scene we'll be using in this recipe is quite similar to another we used back in Chapter 6, Advanced Material Techniques, when we dealt with tessellation. This is a good technique to bring back to this recipe, as that rendering feature isn...