How to Convert all the subdivition surfaces to Polygones

Purpose

Some files in Arty contains a lot of subdivition surfaces. This is probably not a good thing as they use a lot of computing ressources.

That's not difficult to convert them to their original mesh. Later it's the rendering process the smoothness will be managed by the renderer.

The rendering for arty will be done using the renderman render software.

This software has e very accurate "polysmooth" function. This method uses special systems to smooth the objets according to their relative position to the camera.

The "polysmooth" is really clever and smooth only the parts of the object that needs to have resolution. So it's definitively meaningfull to pay attention to have as less polygons as possible in the original objects.

As all the objects for Arty was created using very good techniques. Most of the time they work perfectly with the polysmooths. We just have to get rid of the subdivition surfaces and it works.

Prerequisities

You need to use the Modify/Convert/Subdiv To Polygon menu item to display the convert dialog box. And set it up Like this:

Step by step

One of the issue of the massive convertion is that Maya will stop it's convertion loop if any object in the selection is not a Subdivision surface.

So to avoid any problem and let you select only subdivition surface you will just hide the polygones.

First You hide all:

Then you display the subdivision surfaces by marking the Subdiviion Surface menu item. Only the subdivision will be displayed.

You select all of them with the selection rectangle.

Then you simply apply the convertion with these parameters exactly:

It can take more or less time to complete. But As you only have subdivition surfaces in your selection Maya will hopfully not stop on the middle of the way.

The Object converted will lokk like this. The polygone mesh will be the envelope of the subdivition surface. In this cas that's the lowest possible polygone that cen represent the surface.

It's similar to the enveloppe of a NURBS surface.

Later the Polysmooth will render a surface that will look like this one:

As it will be with a subdivition surface.

Further information

It's a good thing to understand convertions and what is a subdivition surface.
I also strongly recommand to have a look on what is the Pixar Polysmooth.