Meshing ... tests and wishes

 From:  Michael Gibson
2451.50 In reply to 2451.49 
Hi Tony - one tricky thing with using the output for sub-d modeling is that it only works very well for certain special cases, like with just a single untrimmed surface, or a surface of revolution that has not been booleaned.

The way MoI's mesher currently works focuses on making a low polygon count with n-gons. But n-gons can be bad for that specific purpose of using them as a sub-d cage, especially when the n-gons are particularly big and have concave outlines.

Instead of one big n-gon for a planar cap on something for example for sub-d you would rather have a different style of meshing with all surfaces (including planar ones) diced up into regular sized quads, without regard to the underlying surface's UV layout.

That really needs a much different meshing method to make that work well for the general case of trying to convert something like a whole solid to a sub-d... Things would need to be tiled in a pattern that radiated out from the trim edges rather than starting with quads from the underlying UV surface grid which is how the mesher currently works. The way the current mesher works is good for other purposes though like rendering and getting an accurate mesh for STL prototyping, etc... But for sub-d it is not particularly a good fit right now except for limited cases.

Some more info and illustration here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1244.48

- Michael