Hi Steve (STEVE_HOME), here's an example of the kind of thing that I'm talking about re: spheres - here I have taken the original block and cut some sphere pieces out of it and have some fillets and another cut as well. Not a whole lot of stuff but it looks like this now:



Rendering this with exported vertex normals will render all those sphere pieces as perfect spheres, including absolutely no wavering in the reflections.

Good luck trying to create a polygon topology that recreates the same level of crispness in the reflection in the boundary areas... The problem gets more and more difficult when the boundaries become even more irregular like with a some more trims cut out or little holes in the middle of larger faces, stuff like that.

Particularly when you have a mixture of little features like a little hole or notch next to broader surfaces, it becomes quite difficult to get an evenly spaced and sized polygon topology to go on such things. And any kind of unevenness in the polygon topology will affect automatically created vertex normals done by averaging facet normals.

- Michael