Design Nomenclature / Digital Model Making
Crease
Also called edge crease, sub-d crease, crease weight
A per-edge or per-vertex weight telling a subdivision scheme to pull its limit surface back toward the control mesh, sharpening the result without adding geometry. Weights run 0 to 1, or count integer steps of infinite sharpness. Cheap and freely editable — and carried by almost no exporter.
In practice
Not the same as a crease in surfacing (a curvature discontinuity), nor as Mark Sharp, which only splits shading normals and leaves the surface alone.
Not to be confused with
- Support LoopAn extra edge loop placed close to a hard edge so subdivision cannot round it away — the tighter the loop, the sharper the result. It costs geometry and complicates topology, but survives export, deformation, and every renderer, which is why production meshes use it instead of creases.
- SmoothingTwo different things under one word. Mesh smoothing — relax — moves vertices toward the average of their neighbours, evening out spacing and losing volume as it goes. Smooth shading changes no geometry at all: it interpolates normals across faces so a faceted surface reads as curved. The silhouette gives it away.