Many production companies use smoothing engines instead of subD'ing it to death.

Sud D requires far more calculations than smoothing does, making it slower. It is slower on a CPU and GPU. More information and calculations equals slower, there is no way around that.

Sud D changes all the morphs, the UV's etc. All of that has to be calculated and inflates the sizes of the information sent to the render engine. Smoothing does not modify the morphs, UVs etc, and is all handled by the render engine on a per pixel basis.

I also fail to see how the smoothing is not based off of the geometry. How do you think in determines the curve of the smooth?

Smoothing is a spatial index that is determined from the wireframe information. Different engines use different methods to do this, but all of them are based off of the geometry.

Renderman Pro Server is based of Reyes smoothing, guess they need to scrap that and switch to SubD so movies take a few more years to render, instead of 3 months....

Maybe Houdini should scrap Mantra as well, it is Reyes based as well.

Seems odd that the top of the line packages used in production everyday would use smoothing instead of SubD, if SubD was better....

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