Hi Mike,

> The capture to the right is with the shades showing alone. The triangles are gone because MoI is using
> squares. Since squares can better define the contour flow of a surface as far as lighting is concerned,
> it looks really smooth.

It's actually still using triangles for the display in the second case too... The video card inherently only understands triangles, a square is sent over to the video card as 2 triangles.

The difference you're seeing there is not because of squares versus triangles but just that the one on the left has fewer triangles than the one on the right.

The one on the left is done for realtime display purposes, while the one on the right is done for a mesh export to a rendering program. It's important for the realtime display to be fast, so there are various shortcuts taken in order to speed things up which can have an adverse effect on quality. If this was not the case and it instead put an emphasis on quality instead of speed the bad side effect from that choice would be that you'd have to spend extra time waiting around for the display to update every time you did any change to a model.

It's just not practical for the real time display to try and have the qualities of a non-realtime final quality render.

Do you have "Add detail to inflections" turn on under Options > View > Meshing parameters? It can help to put in some additional triangle density in areas like that, that's basically what it's for. But it only tries to add in a couple of more subdivisions than what it would otherwise have.


> But if this also makes selection maps trickier to deal with, I can understand.
> I think this was what you were talking about.

No, I had misunderstood your question, I thought you were talking about quads and triangles because you wanted to have mesh object editing.



> I wish you the best of luck on the Cage Edit thing.
> Would it work on a random selection of control points and not just objects?

I'd think that it would be possible to do it that way.


- Michael