Subd at Render Time?

[valerostudio]

Any way to have Subd work after you start a rendering? Example, like how Skatter has a Render Only feature. You would keep your model in SU set to its lowest subs value for poly economy, but when you render, it will up the sub value and render the high quality version?

[jiminy-billy-bob]

This is literally in discussion between TT and a bunch of render engines developers (and other people interested in this subject)

[valerostudio]

It seems that Maxwell already does something similar using Pixar subdivision.

[thomthom]

@valerostudio said:

It seems that Maxwell already does something similar using Pixar subdivision.

Yea - I just noticed they appear to have OpenSubdiv support. (Which is what I'm working on right now - replacing my own subdivision engine with the industry standard.)

But yea, as Thomas mentions - we've been talking to some render engines in trying to find a generic way for extensions to be able to provide high-poly replacements for objects in a SketchUp model. A generic system that would allow any extension to declare itself as a proxy provider and then have render engines consume the result without needing to know anything about the other extension.