Convert to subd?

 From:  Michael Gibson
11863.17 In reply to 11863.16 
Hi Phiro, the part that is tricky is that sub-d smoothing does not produce good results on just any type of mesh that could be good for rendering.

A mesh being used for sub-d smoothing needs to have certain characteristics to it and the MOI mesher does not produce those particular things.

It is very good at producing other things like clean wireframes using n-gons but that is not what you need for sub-d smoothing.

The main difference is on planar surfaces like this:


The ideal mesh for that planar surface for rendering and having a clean wireframe that looks like the original CAD model is to have just one n-gon polygon for that face, like this:



But an n-gon like that does not behave well for sub-d smoothing. Sub-d smoothing needs the big n-gon to be divided up and not just in any way it needs many interior points to be added (which is not good for the "clean wireframe" style) and arranged in quads.

There is no way to configure MOI's mesher to produce the interior quads for this case which is needed for proper sub-d smoothing. MOI's mesher is just not designed for generating sub-d control cages. It can do other things nicely but not that.

As I mentioned above, there are quad remesher tools in several polygon modeling programs that do produce sub-d type mesh structures but they will tend to work best on all smooth organic models.

- Michael