Pixar - people call it a true curved surface, just like NURBS. The terminology can be really confusing though since most people call standard Catmull-Clark subdivision “Subd modeling”…but in Maya, Hierarchical Subd modeling is very different, and I think that’s what the original poster was asking about. They are a completely different type of shape, but basically target the same kind of workflow.

Hierarchical Subdivision Surfaces are not polygons, and isn’t the same thing as doing a “Smooth Mesh”, or hitting the 3 key on a poly. … btw… don’t confuse normals for mesh smoothing… very very different things. Or even setting the “3” key for rendertime.Īnd lastly… we at work are still modeling for subD. The Smooth Approximation does the same thing as hitting the 3 key. On the first box do a “mesh” “smooth”,… and division levels at 2.Īnd on the other box hit “3” on the keyboard and hold down Shift and rclick hold down on it and move down to “Polygon Display”,… move to the right, and down to “Toggle Hidden Triangles”. Make a box and duplicate it… move it to the right. Smooth Approx is the same as SubD surfaces.

Sorry to derail the topic of Sub-D any further, though. Permit plans from Maya? I don’t see any benefit to such a thing! Again, the other NURBS programs are all as superior in their areas too, I’m just using Rhino as an example.

Maya is fun but they’d have to implement 90% of Rhino’s tools for me to even consider switching to modeling architecture in Maya - and I still don’t see Maya being as print-friendly as Rhino. I model all my arch/viz stuff with NURBS in Rhino, then just export to. And I imagine most people who really need NURBS are already using their favorite tools. Much like people using Zbrush/Mudbox/whatever for sculpting and Nuke/After Effects/whatever for compositing, Maya really can’t do everything for everyone. Also, considering how many other applications specialize in this area, it seems silly (for Autodesk) to waste that much time and energy on something which won’t be a game-changer at all.

My guess is that it would be easier to implement Rhino as a plugin for Maya than to overhaul Maya’s NURBS outright.

Subd rhino