Subdivision Tool
The Subdivision Tool will be available starting from CRYENGINE 3.7.
Overview
Creates a smooth appearance of a mesh without complicated manipulations. A control mesh made with Designer's tools doesn't need many vertices or faces to model complex smooth surfaces.
What is more the user can give each edge a tag called a Semi-Sharp Crease, which can define how sharp each edge is.
Options
Subdivision Level | How many subdivision will be applied:
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Add | Adds an edge tag out of the selected edges which have a specific sharpness. | |
Delete | The selected edge tag will be deleted. |
How to Use
Smooth Subdivision
The subdivision of CryDesigner decomposes each surface to convex hulls and solves T-Junctions before starting to apply subdivision algorithm to the selected designer object.
You can give the subdivision level from 0 to 4 and 0 means that no subdivision will not be applied.
The more subdivision level is the more time will be taken to calculate the subdivision result.
The following images show how a mesh will be subdivided at each subdivision level. Each subdivision level is 0 to 4 from the left image in order.
This is the Level 4 subdivision mesh.
Basically the subdivision way used for CryDesigner can deal with an open geometry as well. Namely boundary edges shared by only one polygon can be subdivided according of the Crease Rule.
Take a look at the next two examples showing a subdivision of an open mesh:
Semi-Sharp Creases
The upper both objects use the same control mesh but the left image is showing an smooth subdivision result and the right image is containing a subdivided mesh to which semi-crease sharpness is applied.
An example of a semi-sharp crease. The control mesh(whose subdivision level is 4) for each of these surfaces is the unit cube drawn in wireframe, where crease edges are orange and smooth edges are black.
In the first image, the crease sharpness is 0, meaning that all edges are smooth. The sharpnesses for the following images are 1,2,3, and infinite (more than 4), respectively.
| Crease Sharpness 0 | Crease Sharpness 1 | Crease Sharpness 2 |
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| Crease Sharpness 3 | Crease Sharpness Infinite (>4) |
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Restrictions
- Currently the subdivision is supporting only Smooth Subdivision.
- If any edges in an edge tag group is modified with the other modification tools in CryDesigner, the edge tag will be invalid.
- The adaptive subdivision and data parallel subdivision have not been applied yet so the speed of calculation can be slow as the subdivision level is a maximum or close to it.
So it is recommended that the subdivision is kept off while modifying a mesh and then after finishing the modification the subdivision gets on. - If a level consists of many subdivided designer objects, the loading of the level can be slow because of the time of subdivision calculation as loaded.
So be careful so that a level don't have too many subdivided designer objects.