Subdivision modifier: set both subdivs to 1 and add lock button

General Forums Blender Development Discussion
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If you read the thread title and thought: “Yeah, that’d be nice!” then please award a token of appreciation to the task:

https://developer.blender.org/D10187

Thanks!

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Some elucidation:

  • 9 out of 10 times I’d like both values to be the same. That means a lot of superfluous clicks while working with many subdivided objects.
  • I always like to start with a subdivision of 1 and increase the iterations only if necessary. But ever so often, 1 subdivision suffices.
  • Very often I discover that in a hurry I forgot to decrease the default rendering value of 2 on several objects, resulting in an overly complex scene during rendering.
  • A different iteration for rendering has a hidden risk of subsequent modifiers yielding a different result in the rendering than in the viewport.
  • The lock eases increasing both values at once, which you’ll want most of the time.
  • If you’d like the rendering value to always be one iteration higher, then unlock, increase the rendering value, lock, and the values will remain synchronized.
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That is interesting. Not just because of an animation pipeline, but even in a hard surface pipeline, I find I never have the two set to the same, especially with animation where it is usually set to 0 for characters while animating in the viewport and 1 but usually 2 for rendering. The main reason I rarely have them the same in most cases is Blender’s performance with Subdivision is rather poor.

Default of 1 and 2 is what I use in most cases. And find more often than not only changing viewport to 0.

That said, a lock feature not on by default is a great idea.

Better would be having a setting in preferences to make your own default including having lock on or off.

What do you think?

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Thanks for your feedback Richard. Interesting. A Preferences setting to customize your own defaults would be ideal indeed. I’ll add that to the task’s thread.

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Kinda offtopic but the most annoying modifier with separate viewport / render setting is spin since it doesn’t even have render 0 = same as viewport behavior and you need to adjust both sliders…

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Yeah, a lock button would be useful for more modifier types.