Hi neo,

> Could nPower's quad mesher be useful in situations like that?

In theory...

But I actually have the code for that quad mesher included in the Solids++ geometry library that I use, and I tried hooking it up and found it to not be robust enough for general use.

If you look at the image in the link you posted a bit more closely you can see that particular example would be good for making a kind of pseudo-fillet along the hard edges, that part is fine.

But on the internal parts you can see that there are some irregular areas, some quads that are nearly shaped as triangles. This is not really a problem in planar areas like the case shown there, but if the surface is curved those kinds of topological irregularities would probably produce some bumps or undulations when they were used as a source sub-d cage.

It's pretty easy to get things like lumps in sub-d surfaces, here is a tutorial that may help to explain:
http://www.guerrillacg.org/home/3d-polygon-modeling/subdivision-topology-artifacts

It tends to take some experience and human intelligence to make good sub-d friendly topology choices, I'm not very confident that a completely automated tiling mechanism is going to be able to do the same job in all cases...

But certainly it would still be useful in certain circumstances - if your main goal would be to round off sharp edges that part would probably work well with that style of quadifying, since the topology is good exactly along the original edges - it is where things collide internally that make problems.

But basically, I would say to not expect a magic silver bullet comprehensive "works everywhere" solution from something like that.

- Michael