This was originally gonna be in the help section, but while I was typing out a question about calculating the normals I had an idea and it ended up working.
I have upgraded the visuals for the tires in my bike game and I wanted to share. I sample a texture for vertex displacement, use gradient descent to make the normals, and I can color the treads separately to simulate stuff like dirt or mud on the tires. I would like to add a squish effect where the tire meets the ground next.
Is it worth the extra 500k triangles? Maybe.
Update: it actually affects performance