Originally posted by Stryke 9
Maybe for YOU. I've had worse problems with the advanced vert models. I think it's a program difference- RDS is partially built around a spline modeller, which is evidently what the majority of people used to model in it. Can't understand that, myself... and at any rate, they're easy to convert to polygons if needed.
Converting splines to polygons is where the processor hogging comes from. Until you bake the splines, they're very light on cycles. The problem is that you have to bake the splines before you can send them to the renderer anyway. Now, RDS probably handles that properly. Lightwave would require (I think) that I use subpatch objects and even that would need to be booleaned out.
In this case, using a displacement map makes the most sense. Creating a simple, fine grained, seamless gray scale image is very easy. Add that to the inner surfaces of the barrel and the let the renderer do its work. Rather than a boolean, it will subdivide the polys, and (for lack of a better term) jitter them to where they need to be based on the displacement values. this is much faster than booleaning the rifling during the modelling process.
