Note about "Pixar’s OpenSubdiv V2: a detailed look" - ychding11/HWTess GitHub Wiki
It is published on September 18, 2013 by Mike Seymour at fxguide.
- OpenSubdiv is at the heart of Pixar's modeling pipeline.
- Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces were originally invented in the 1970s and formalized into a usable technique for animation in 1998 at Pixar.
- The aim of OpenSubdiv is to allow the artist to work with a more faithful representation of what you are doing. It can render faster, and allow for greater interoperability.
- artists need to think about modeling at much lower resolution and let the subdivision process - managed by OpenSubdiv - provide the high quality, high poly count surface at render time.
- All Pixar characters are subdivision surface. This meant animators could not see exactly what they were getting, for example, characters's smile, they must wait render result. GPU version OpenSubdiv can solve this pain.
- In 2014 and before, OpenSubdiv is blazingly fast on the GPU. Pixar favors the adaptive subdivision while Arnold favors uniform subdivision. So Arnold does not use it.