OTOY Forums

There's a disturbing lack of videos on YT for this and I'm not finding any real walk-throughs here. I loaded a plane that has around 50 polys. 4-sided, very subD friendly. Do I use LWs subD controls at all or just Octanes? Or both? I am not seeing any results other than LW subD.

You don't need to use both Subdivision - you need to choose one of them. For my taste, the one that Octane provides is better - it does not require control over the level of the Subdivision of the object during the preparation of the scene, if the object turns out to be too heavy during subdivision.
But if you have a complex object that partially consists of surfaces that cannot be subdivided - you should choose Law native Subdivision.

If it behaves like Octane's sub-d in other host programs, you will not see the smoothing until render time. That's really the point- all the subdivision is handled by hardware at render time, so the scene geometry itself can stay lighter, staying more responsive, and taking up less memory, both RAM and VRAM.