Looking at Square Enix’s implementation of Open SubDiv in the engine makes me very interested in seeing this in Unity. (Agni's Philosophy FINAL FANTASY REALTIME TECH DEMO) Considering Pixar made it open source it should be simple to at least grab it and make some sort of implementation quickly. I wonder if the Unity developers are working to implement Pixar’s Open SubDiv at all? I’m also wondering if they are working on adding Ptex as well which would be huge as well especially for 3D artists.
If this was the case unreal and crytek would have implemented it already in their products.
Unlikely to be added:
On one hand it requires GLEW, which means about half the supported platforms would be cut or require major efforts
On the other hand it offers optional GPGPU which for stuff like seen on the movie are not remotely ‘optional’ anymore, which is a thing not supported on Unity outside DX11s DirectCompute either which Open SubDiv on the other hand does not support
It’s not really intended for use in games. Unlikely to be adopted by any major engine for some time.
Impossible…it was closed, inaccesible source until just recently.
Your missing my point, udk and many other engines get major updates every month (admittingly mostly large team based workflow and lighting upgrades). Any easy to implement feature in that was worth being in a AAA game engine would appear in at-least udk within months and they would tell you via their fb/twitter/email etc when they started. This thread should be closed.
It’s only been made available in the last couple of months.
Well said from a non-programmer.
If it’s so simple to add it then build your own engine using it? It is open source right?
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You were missing the point. Pixar’s SubDiv algorithms are not only closed, but there’s no other implementation that comes close to it’s efficiency.
Check out the tech demo (particularly starting at about 10:00) Open SubDiv Tech Demo
Such and a$$hat. I mean there’s so much third party source already integrated in Unity because it works, go crawl back down your troll hole.
I didn’t mean to insult you. Unless you have done it yourself don’t insult the unity dev’s by saying it should be simple to do.
I thought Tessellation feature in DX11 that UT is bringing in is essentially the same thing.
From Microsoft :
“The Direct3D 11 runtime supports three new stages that implement tessellation, which converts low-detail subdivision surfaces into higher-detail primitives on the GPU. Tessellation tiles (or breaks up) high-order surfaces into suitable structures for rendering.”
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ff476340(v=vs.85).aspx
From Nvidia:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/tessellation.html
EDIT: Unity 4 already supporting it
http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Components/SL-SurfaceShaderTessellation.html
The only real difference between DX11 Tessellation vs “Subdivision surface” is in the modeling stage, the “Subdivision surface” requires ‘quad’ polygons to work while DX11 Tessellation doesn’t - it works regardless since it subdivides trianglar mesh. In term of workflow and pipeline - there is no difference to you as far as I can see - you just model as usual (in quads if you like) and export the mesh and Unity will triangulate it anyway and it will go through DX11 Tessellation stage and comes out looking the same as any other Subdiv surface implementation.
Well, TBH Unity cant just say it is to hard, there has to be other reasons… but yeah it would be great if we had this implemented.
Anyway, I just say that because I love all features, from what I see it seems like this is just a better version of tessellation… and maybe not real time?
Dynamic tessellation is good enough for hard surface assets and non-organic animating assets and will probably be deemed good enough by a lot of shops for everything, but my guess is that Open SubDiv is far more efficient for animating organics with mixed surface characteristics like characters. Consider that it’s a time tested technology before you judge.
Just as importantly, from an asset management standpoint, there are lots of Film resolution models that would probably be able to just pass through to a game pipeline without modification or with minimal modification. Most formally trained modelers learn to model in quads before jumping into process saving low poly techniques, it’s just part of being a professional.
So, would you enlighten us what is the real advantage of Open SubDiv over DX11 tessellation?
But if it’s already “film resolution” doesn’t that defeat the point of this, which is to dynamically increase the resolution of low(er) resolution models?
I personally wouldn’t want to use film resolution models in a game pipeline, though. For a start they’ll take up a lot more space, and secondly there are performance considerations aside from straight up poly count which matter, such as the type and number of materials.
Come on man, use your eyes… the quality Open SubDiv is clearly a massive step above tessellation in terms of quality, if you look a a tessellated thing it is nearly always visible were the original polygons were this no way!
Massive step forward? You do realize the quality depends entirely on the implementation of tessellation algorithm (the way of polygon distribution) and tessellation level (how many polygons) right?? It is entirely up to you how you implement your algorithm and tessellation level.
Again, show me the advantage or an example of so called “massive quality difference”. 
I was kinda bewildered by the tessellation on DX11. To me, I was expecting the SubD surface like Catmull Clark and not that mess of polygons, but it looks very clean and detailed, especially when it is used with displacement mapping
BTW, Charles Loop from Microsoft wrote a paper on this 2 years ago :
Paper:
Presentation: