Hi PaQ,

> I suppose it's planned with the layer system, but be able to
> change the display detail level per object/layer would be
> welcome for this kind of work too.

I'm kind of hoping to get that solved by having a kind of automatic "down shift" type system for lowering detail on small parts without having to mess around with settings for it.

Some kind of manual control could be useful, but pretty labor intensive in many situations like if you import a highly detailed existing CAD model through STEP or IGES formats, you probably don't want to spend an hour setting custom detail properties on all the little bits of it to get it to a more manageable level.

It kind of needs to happen more automatically for it to help out in a wider number of situations.

NURBS models made up of a ton of little tiny surface fragments will tend to be rather heavy in many aspects though, things like trim curves on a NURBS model have both a 3D curve and a UV curve for every segment in the trim boundary. That kind of goes along with the whole ability to have an "underlying surface".

A polygon mesh object has less overhead per polygon than that. Of course the nice thing with the NURBS structure is that each surface is an actual curved surface and not just a flat polygon, so one surface in the NURBS model under normal circumstances covers a larger area, like as you know a sphere can be just one surface in a NURBS model instead of a whole bunch of polygons to approximate it.

- Michael