Convert Maya SubD to a Poly for export

[Adam H. Stewart]

I am working on a very simple scene that was created with Maya. I want to export a couple of items that are SubD into Polys so I can work on them in 3ds. FBX or OBJ don't work. Does anybody know how you convert from a SubD into a poly ? or can it even be done ?
I found a reference in the help but it doesn't give any details.

Thanks as always.

[Morbid Angel]

you are in luck, however I must warn you, that converting very highly tesselated maya's subd will result in very heavy meshes in poly mode.

Go to modify/convert/subdiv to polygons

play with the options to get the result, then use obj to export.

[Adam H. Stewart]

Thanks a Million

Thanks a million - you saved me hours of work. I knew I had done it but I just couldn't find the damn button. The conversion was actually pretty sweet, turned out nice without any tweaking.

Thanks Again - :P

[Morbid Angel]

good stuff. maya's subd's are the only true subd's around atleast used to be. In xsi, i just found out that subd's are actually approximated smoothed polys. But in maya each subd voxel is trillions of polys. In max, hmm...they are also subd's but not as advanced as in maya.

[Da_elf]

what about vray sub-d?

[percydaman]

ya, rendertime subdivision baby! hehe

[Morbid Angel]

as i have explained to elf, these are two different things. vray subdivision subdivides the mesh on render, and it affects the entire mesh. Subdivision surfaces is the way to approximate detalization of the specific areas and is a different way of modeling all together. Like nurbs are different from poly, so are subds.