The primary requirement of the base mesh is that major surface features are represented by coarse polygons that provide a rough outline of the features. Subdivision Surface technology can be used to add detail to these models, perhaps to make them more appropriate for rendering on higher performance processors. These include environment meshes such as terrain and objects on the terrain, as well as stationary buildings and their interiors. Examples include the skins of bones-based character animations and meshes modeling cloth. Adaptive subdivision works to dynamically generate a mesh that provides the same visual quality as a uniformly subdivided mesh, but with a smaller triangle count requiring fewer rendering sources.
Adaptive subdivision adds surface detail only where needed based on a subdivision metric.
Subdivision Surface technology provides some sample metrics, like screen space error, but developers are encouraged to write custom metrics using the simple metric plug-in interface. Many subdivision computations from one frame will be valid for the next frame and do not need to be recalculated. This strategy is appropriate only for static meshes, like the sample model terrain .