Subdivision surface overview

A subdivision surface lets you subdivide specific regions of a mesh, giving you the ability to finely tune or smooth certain areas without changing the entire mesh.

Subdivision surfaces help you keep a lower polygon count because they only insert control points where you need them (instead of uniformly across the entire mesh). However, subdivision surfaces have the slowest performance of the three smoothing methods. See Smoothing polygons.

Note: Subdivision surfaces are largely unsupported in pipelines outside of Maya, so you need to convert them to polygons or NURBS before exporting to these pipelines. You can convert using either Modify > Convert Subdiv to Polygons or Modify > Convert Subdiv to NURBS.

For more information on subdivision surfaces, see the Subdivision Surfaces documentation archive, available at http://www.autodesk.com/maya-docs-archive.

Related topics

• Subdiv to Polygons Options
• Subdiv to NURBS Options