Like many other i'm sure, i recently watched the Nvidia Pixar GPU conference.
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/45386636 It gave unprecedented incite into the Pixar workflow, now there was a lot of cool stuff on display, but what interested me in this instance, was there methodology for creasing: indicating the hardness of an edge to the rendrerer without having to add extra geometry to hold said information, thus optimizing the polycount, and making life easier for modelers riggers CPU and GPU's alike. Creasing has always been a bit of a fuzzy area in my experience, rarely have i seen it implemented or used in production, which is ironic given the advantages it seems to offer. Now most DCC's support it in the viewport, it is available in Maya Max Softimage Modo, and will render in mental ray as a default. however during last years trasition to arnold, when inquiering about creasing, i was told by a shader artist that Arnold does not support Edge creasing which i found perplexing. (not sure if it was just Mtoa) Can anyone confirm this ? Personally i think Edge creasing and even vertex creasing are great, i can't imagine how frustrating it must be for a rigger to have to deal with 2 to 3 edge loops to control the creasing of a lip or eyelid during blendshapes when the same result can be achieved by simply selecting 1 edge and indicating the crease angle. Have any of the beta testers for Redshift come across this ? I'm working on a character at the moment, and i'd like to know if i should put in the extra detail or add creasing, given i might not be the one to rig it.
