Question concerning subdivision of meshes

[wilson_77]

I have bought my octane license a quite long while ago, but never really did much with it. I checked back to the forum requently though, and really like how octane is evolving, and I'm under the impression that the development has sped up a little the past months.

I tested rendering an object from a tv spot we did a while ago (rendered with mental ray originally) with octane, and am very pleased with the results. I also like the new post effects implemented in 1.01, looking really, really nice. My compliments to the developers.

The question now concerns the geometry of the object I have rendered (and any objects I will probably render with Octane in the future).

The object I rendered with Octane is a laptop, and my question concerns the geometry/ UVs of the laptop and subdivisions.

I originally built the laptop in Modo, when we rendered it using mental ray it was converted to subdivision surfaces to give a smooth result. Since Octane does not support subdivision surfaces, I simply subdivided the mesh in Modo a couple of times so it appears smooth when rendered in Octane at close distance.

The problem is with the UVs/ the textures. The laptop has an air conditioning outlet (or whatever the correct terminology is), its several long rows of individual dots that I created as a bump map (if you know what I mean...). The problem is that the rows of dots got distorted due to the automatic subdivisioning, the distance between the individual dots got quite irregular and distorted.

This is, of course, not an Octane problem directly.

To make a long story short: how do you deal with the fact that Octane does not support subdivision surfaces? Do you subdivide your objects before exporting them as an OBJ? What if the UVs and textures get distorted due to this process? Do you create the UVs after subdividing? Which would be a real pain in the a**?

[kavorka]

You need to keep that in mind when subdividing. Check it in MODO as a subdivided mesh with the UVs, if it looks good there, it'll look good in Octane.