For an overview, I’ll be using this rather simple valve wheel I put together from concept to final build in literally about 10 minutes (I love that power of NURBS). The process was really just simple extrudes for the middle cylinder, a path sweep for the ring of the handle, a loft for the arms, and just Boolean unioning everything together with some fillets at the junctions. All simple operations in NURBS that would take me far longer planning proper poly flow to merge up if I did it in polygons.
The final goal of this thing was to be imported into ZBrush for creating surface detailing, then to make a low-poly game version to cast the details onto. All that process is not what I’m going to talk about, but what I did to get it there IS.
The main goal I had was to get a good quad poly flow out of it. Gleaning from the various posts I’ve read, the mesher in MoI works by getting an angle to split the edges on and then following the UV isoparams. As such, the density and quality of the surfaces are very important. But another concern is trims. I’ll explain more later, but for now let’s just toss the item as-is into the mesh output process.
This is the default settings that come up (for me) every time I restart MoI (I wish it would save the last used mesher settings between sessions). It’s in N-gons, with splitting at 12 degrees, and “Weld vertices along edges” off. N-gons output is the best for this kind of work because it keeps MoI from tessellating inconsistent edges into triangles (which are a pain to clean up). I also turn off the weld operation because it usually causes more pain in cleanup than help.
Now, these settings really are way too much for my goal. The mesh is far too dense. While I could just take this and then remove edges, MoI lets me do much more tweaking to get closer to my needs.
Now, with some toying around, we can get this mesh. It’s lighter, which will be a great help in cleanup. The “divide larger” is there to keep some polygon density on things like those arms, as well as adding more divisions on the outer ring to keep a good silhouette. The” avoid smaller,” going by its name, would allow you this it demolishes those small fillets, but it doesn’t; instead it often doesn’t do anything at all at this large of an angle. I’ve never found much use in the aspect ratio; for me, it often just adds far more density to the mesh than I want, while also introducing annoying T-junctions.