"Chris Huff" <chr### [at] maccom> wrote in message
news:chrishuff-178997.11163210032001@news.povray.org...
> In article <3aa616a9@news.povray.org>, "Peter Cracknell"
> <pc### [at] lineonenet> wrote:
>
> > Fair point, but when I picture subdivision in action I picture a
modeller
> > actually in control and view of a mesh which then gets 'subdivided',
> > POV-Ray could subdivide therefore, but in general the subdivision
> > will be of imported mesh's won't it anyway?  So yes it could be used,
> > just not as ideally as people would like.
>
> I'm not sure I understand...subdivision would be used on meshes, height
> fields, and other mesh-based objects, and a lot of meshes are generated
> within scene files...and I don't see why it wouldn't be useful for
> imported meshes. You could get away with much smaller files, and get
> much lower RAM usage. (At the cost of some render time, though it could
> also be more efficient, by only subdividing triangles when necessary.
> And if you really want speed, you could subdivide the entire mesh before
> rendering.)
> In fact, to get the best out of subdivision surfaces, you *have* to have
> it built into the renderer...there's no way around it.
> Sure, you could also use a modeller, but then you are restricted to
> externally generated meshes, huge files, and high RAM requirements.

Obviously subdivision on imported meshes would be useful, but from what I've
read (and therefore reckon) is that the process of creating a mesh with
subdivision is a cycle of mesh editing, subdivision preview, mesh editing
repeat etc.  To do this with POV-Ray you would have to export subdivide
check, go back to your modeller edit and repeat.

To be fair I think my modeller bias is coming through so I'll probably leave
it there.  All in all subdivision is an extremely powerful tool that can
according to previews put many hours of work on organic objects to shame
very quickly.

Peter Cracknell (.com)

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