Indigo Manual > Rendering with Indigo

Mesh Settings

There are some settings that control how a triangle mesh is rendered in Indigo - in particular the subdivision and displacement settings. Please read on for details on these.

Instancing

Instancing is a way to replicate scene geometry or meshes without using much additional memory - each instanced object shares the original mesh data, however the material and placement in the scene can be different.

This is useful in many situations where there are multiple copies of the same mesh data (such as chairs around a table, or trees in a forest) to reduce the memory usage required for detailing an environment.

An excellent example is given below by forum user Godzilla:


Image by Godzilla

Subdivision

Subdivison off
Subdivison On

Subdivision divides each triangle in the mesh into 4 new triangles, with each subdivision level increasing the number of triangles exponentially. Therefore a large mesh of, say, 1 million triangles becomes 4 million triangles when subdivided only once. When subdivided twice it becomes 16 million triangles, and when subdivided three times it becomes 64 million triangles.

Below are available settings:

View Dependent Subdivide only meshes visible by the camera
Max Subdivisions How many times to subdivide the mesh. Polycount becomes exponentially larger with each subdivision level.
Curvature Threshold Triangles will not be subdivided if their curvature is smaller than this threshold.
Pixel Threshold Triangles will not be subdivided if they are smaller than this pixel threshold.