Smooth polygon meshes at render time
 
 
 

To smooth polygon meshes at render time, use the following workflow. This is a very efficient method of smoothing polygon meshes as it reduces the amount of data calculations during interactive manipulation.

Major advantages for this feature include the following:

The drawback of this feature, however, is that all Maya creasing will render differently with this technique, since the creasing appears different in the scene view as compared to its mental ray render.

  1. Open the Approximation Editor ( Window > Rendering Editors > mental ray > Approximation Editor).
  2. Click the Create button beside the Subdivision approx. (Poly, Subdiv) attribute to create and assign a subdivision approximation to your polygon.
  3. Render the scene in mental ray.
    NoteYou can also smooth polygon meshes by selecting Mesh > Smooth. This method creates denser geometry in the scene view and can increase the number of data calculations for interactive manipulation.