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Concept
Subdivision surface
Summary
In the field of 3D computer graphics, a subdivision surface (commonly shortened to SubD surface or Subsurf) is a curved surface represented by the specification of a coarser polygon mesh and produced by a recursive algorithmic method. The curved surface, the underlying inner mesh, can be calculated from the coarse mesh, known as the control cage or outer mesh, as the functional limit of an iterative process of subdividing each polygonal face into smaller faces that better approximate the final underlying curved surface. Less commonly, a simple algorithm is used to add geometry to a mesh by subdividing the faces into smaller ones without changing the overall shape or volume.
The opposite is reducing polygons or un-subdividing.
A subdivision surface algorithm is recursive in nature. The process starts with a base level polygonal mesh. A refinement scheme is then applied to this mesh. This process takes that mesh and subdivides it, creating new vertices and new faces. The positions of the new vertices in the mesh are computed based on the positions of nearby old vertices, edges, and/or faces. In many refinement schemes, the positions of old vertices are also altered (possibly based on the positions of new vertices).
This process produces a denser mesh than the original one, containing more polygonal faces (often by a factor of 4). This resulting mesh can be passed through the same refinement scheme again and again to produce more and more refined meshes. Each iteration is often called a subdivision level, starting at zero (before any refinement occurs).
The limit subdivision surface is the surface produced from this process being iteratively applied infinitely many times. In practical use however, this algorithm is only applied a limited, and fairly small (), number of times.
Mathematically, the neighborhood of an extraordinary vertex (non-4-valent node for quad refined meshes) of a subdivision surface is a spline with a parametrically singular point.
Subdivision surface refinement schemes can be broadly classified into two categories: interpolating and approximating.
Official source
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