Why Fast Subdivision ?
Creating your own animation is now super easy. Have you seen one of those cool websites that have an animated explainer right on the home page? Typically these are expensive studio created works of art. But now new services like Powtoon allow you to make your own video in just a few hours with free animated video maker software.
Subdivision surfaces are commonly used for final rendering of character shapesfor a smooth and controllable limit surfaces. However, subdivision surfaces ininteractive apps are typically drawn as their polygonal control hulls because ofperformance. The polygonal control hull is an approximation that is offset fromthe true limit surface. Looking at an approximation in the interactive app makesit difficult to see exact contact, like fingers touching a potion bottle or handstouching a cheek. It also makes it difficult to see poke-throughs in cloth simulationif the skin and cloth are both approximations. This problem is particularly bad whenone character is much larger than another and unequal subdiv face sizes causeapproximation errors to be magnified.
Maya and Pixar's proprietary Presto animation system can take 100ms to subdividea character of 30,000 polygons to the second level of subdivision (500,000 polygons).Being able to perform the same operation in less than 3ms allows the user to interactwith the smooth, accurate limit surface at all times.