USD and Subdivision

[teovfx]

Hello. I have a question about Maya USD. Apart from creating proxies, is it possible to add subdivision to a polymesh with the render engine? From what I've seen, I understand it's possible with Houdini, but is it achievable in Maya? Or does it work in the USD workflow with a high-poly and proxy approach? Is there anyone who can help me with this?

[hagen.deloss]

Hi @teovfx ,

Thanks for bringing your USD question to the forums! I don't have a direct answer, but I will ask the dev team about it! For some light reading, here are the new release notes for Maya 2025 USD, and the getting started USD page as well.

I will keep this thread updated when I get some insight from the experts 😄 

Warm regards, 

 

[bjorn.siegert · Accepted solution]

If I get this right, you are talking about the refinement level how subd meshes are rendered, correct? This is not supported through the Maya viewport render delegate used by mayaUSD. We did though add this recently to Hydra for Maya (https://github.com/Autodesk/maya-hydra/releases/tag/v0.6.1). If you are part of the beta forum you can test this with the latest PR of Maya or wait until it comes out with an update release of mayaUSD.

Please do keep in mind that Hydra for Maya is still a technology preview and by no means production ready.