Hi Tommy,

> It could be also interesting for the N-Gons setting to have a checkbox that gives
> "mesh-cleanness" a higher priority than the angle, so the algorithm would try to
> maintain a certain subdivision throughout one NURBS patch to get more quad polys.

Yeah this is kind of another tricky area. Most of the time an irregular surface will have different levels of hierarchy in it when it is refined. To not have any refinement hierarchy would generally mean having an extremely dense initial grid, but that can get out of hand pretty easily with a really huge quantity of little tiny polygons in areas that don't really need them.

Also, even with an extremely dense initial grid you still aren't going to get quads only (instead of N-Gons) along the edges of the surface if you have done operations like trims or booleans that generate more complex trim curves on the surface. Here is a thread that illustrates what happens with trim curves: http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1016.1

It would take a significantly different approach to only generate quads along trim edges instead of N-Gons.

I have some idea of adding in some other control to try and let you override the regular angle subdivision. I was thinking of possibly another angle parameter. If this was specified, I would make a pass through the mesh after subdivision had happened, and try and glue divided pieces back into a larger piece if they were within this other angle. So maybe you could have a primary angle of 5 and a "glue back together" angle of 1, that might work as a way to try and reduce subdivisions.

But I also kind of worry about adding in so many elaborate parameters to the whole thing as well...


> but I just found that if you import an obj into XSI and let it make separate
> objects out of the obj-groups, it will not import the user-normals at all (XSI 6.5).

It's definitely worthwhile to get the proper normals in, that really makes a significant difference.



> but I hope you will continue to develop MoI in this kind of open manner, so that
> registered users can always get the latest beta to try out the new stuff and give
> some feedback and don't have to wait all the way up to Version 2.0 ;-)

Yup, this is definitely the plan. I hope it won't take too long after version 1 ships before I'll be back doing more beta releases for version 2.0 . The only difference from the current pre-version 1 betas will be that the 2.0 betas will probably only be available to version 1.0 customers instead of just freely available for anyone to use.


> One question: When I first write a message, I have no formating toolbar on the top
> of the message window (for things like image links etc.) but if I edit an existing
> message, there is a full featured formating toolbar above the test field. Is it possible
> to enable that toolbar always? Thanks!

Currently there isn't a way to enable it - I sliced out that toolbar along with several other things to simplify this forum from its initial configuration, but I forgot to strip it out of that Edit message page as well. After version 1 is out I should be able to tune up the forum a bit and I would like to add back in a simplified toolbar to the initial post page at that time as well.

- Michael