Autodesk posts a look at inside Pixar’s OpenSubdiv as shown by Bill Polson, Dirk Van Gelder, Manuel Kraemer, Takahito Tejima, David G. Yu and Dale Ruffolo, from Pixar Animation Studios’ GPU team. You should really check out the OpenSubdiv performance and workflow between OpenSubdiv and Ptex.
how real time display of subdivision surfaces helps artists be more productive, and how this code is open source and engineered for ease of integration
This is an interesting look at how OpenSubiv has continued to make advances since its announcement, with technology serving solutions as hierarchal editing, and feature adaptive subdivision which will define patches in a model based on criteria of a face or set of faces.
This will isolate irregular features in the model and distribute different “patch types” among them, including regular B-Splines, transition patches, and Gregory Patches. This increases the performance of a subdivided surface, where all patches are being calculated on the GPU, without having to worry about tessellation, making working super high tessellated models a possibility.
OpenSubdiv is a set of open source libraries that use high-performance subdivision surface evaluation on CPU and GPU processors. OpenSubdiv is the same subdivision technology that Pixar have created, researched and used over the years, and now is still an active collaboration on fast GPU drawing between Microsoft Research and Pixar.
