Hi Danny, that can actually help somewhat to have it structured the way you show there, with more of a partitioning between different regions of that long surface rather than just one long single piece.

With a long single piece that goes through a lot of bends, what will happen is the mesher will attempt to fit a regular uniform mesh on it but will have to give up on that since it would take too many polygons to do a completely uniform evenly-spaced mesh across the whole thing.

When you have it separated out into more individual regions like you have done there, that can help each section to get a uniform base mesh on it, which can help to avoid adaptive subdivision of the mesh.

Adaptive subdivision is the kind of thing shown here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2379.3 which will divide only certain areas of the surface into smaller pieces instead of having a totally uniform division throughout the entire thing. You won't get simple quads anymore in areas where adaptive subdivision happens, where there is a transition from one level of subdivision to the next.

But at any rate, some of these issues are things that can come into effect with any kind of model when you want to make a coarse, low-polygon version of it that doesn't have odd things sticking out from it. Coarse meshing and jagged shapes kind of tend to go along with one another, so it can take some targeted manipulation of the meshing parameters to get low polygons without too many artifacts. That can be kind of a separate issue from the modeling technique used since it applies to a wide variety of models.

- Michael