Sorry for the long title, couldn't figure out how to express it shorter without being overly ambigious as to what this post is about.
Anyway, I've been poking around with displacement maping using the hardware tessellation features of DX11 for getting some more vertices to actually displace the last few days, for no particular reason other than to try it out so I'm not really looking for other ways to solve some specific problem.
Displacing a sphere or some other surface with completely connected faces work out as intended but issues obviously occur where there are multiple vertices with the same position but different normals (these vertices then get displaced in different directions and thus become disconnected => gaps appear in the geometry). I tried to mock up some simple solution to this by finding out which vertices share positions in my meshes and then setting a flag for these to tell my domain shader to not displace those vertices at all; it wouldn't be overly pretty but at least the mesh should be gapless and it hopefully wouldn't be too noticeable I reasoned. Of course this didn't work out very well (the whole subdivision patches generated from such overlapping vertices had their displacement factors set to 0 creating quite obvious, large frames around right angles and such). What I'm wondering is basically if this is a reasonable approach to try to refine further or if there are other ways to go about it that may be better? The only article on the topic I've managed to find mostly went on about the exquisitness of Bezier curves but didn't really seem to come to any conclusions (although maybe those would've been obvious to anyone having the required math skills).
Thankful for any pointers on this, the more I try to force this, the more it feels like I'm probably missing something.
As for my implementation of the tessellation, I've mostly based it around what is described in chapter 18.7 and 18.8 of Introduction to 3D Game Programming With DirectX 11 (http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-3D-Game-Programming-DirectX/dp/1936420228).