Among all the commercial rendering engines on the market, 3Delight is the only renderer able to render surfaces smoothly at any detail level. A very striking feature for Softimage artists is the absence of almost all surface tessellation controls.
The following geometric approximation properties are not needed in 3Delight for Softimage:
Surface
All the refinement settings are ignored. 3Delight will tessellate surfaces as required by the shading rate, which is specified in Quality and can be modified on a per-object basis in Quality Properties.
Polygon Mesh
The Render Level property is interpreted as follows: a value of ‘0’ will render the polygon mesh as usual and any value greater than ‘0’ will render the polygon mesh as a smooth subdivision surface. Users will notice that rendering perfectly smooth subdivisions is almost a no-cost operation in 3Delight for Softimage.
Displacement
Displacements are rendered to sub pixel accuracy as dictated by the shading rate. The Max Displ. property is considered by 3Delight and is of prime importance for the quality and speed of displacements: values that are too large will slow down the renders and values that are too small may cause cracks in the rendered image. 3Delight will issue warnings if the displacement bounds are too large or too small.
Surface Trim
3Delight uses an analytical algorithm for trim curves (not relying on surface tessellation). This means that all the parameters in this section are not considered and trim curves are always smooth.
Hair
If Curve Type is set to ‘Quadratic’ or ‘Cubic’, 3Delight for Softimage will render them as smooth curves. The Render Level property is thus not useful when using displacements, 3Delight tessellates geometry to sub-pixel accuracy, adaptively.
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