Just want to share some notes and a tip about exporting tessellated mesh for animation with Iray.
Exporting scene to Iray with tessellated objects (characters specifically) is quite unstable as of now, when it comes to the vertex/face count in the exported scene file. The discrepancy could go up to 50%.
In the video below I do consecutive exports with different types of smoothing and as you may see every time tessellation is used (after exporting with other methods) it produces different file size (meaning vertex/faces count in the export is different).
It ranges from 12Mb to 23Mb for the same scene, same settings and without moving a camera!
This is really bad and must be fixed. I'll submit it to FT when I have a chance.Now a TIP: Tessellation is sensitive to hidden mesh (and I am not talking about hiding objects or item of cloth in the scene manager).
So before adding a tessellation to the character's body and getting ready for Iray scene export, bring it to the CC and hide body mesh as much as possible.
You would safe substantially in the export.
For instance, in the above video tessellated Jade's body mesh was resulting in 12Mb scene file (well at least at the beginning).
After I hid some body mesh in CC and sent her back to iClone, the exported scene file went down to 7Mb.
That is a lot of savings per single character when you are exporting animated sequence.
Finally the main difference between subdivision and tessellation is, that if you apply tessellation to the body, you must apply it to all clothing items and a hair (in some cases) as well.
That is because tessellation results is slight mesh inflation and the pock through might occur if body is not *synchronized* with cloth. While subdivision retains the mesh intact volume wise.
Edited
5 Years Ago by
4u2ges