I guess I'm just being a moron in trying to explain my thoughts here. Sorry Michael if I'm sounding like an idiot on repeat. ^_^;
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I know that looking at the nice clean n-gon wireframes starts to make the gears go in sub-d modelers heads about how they could leverage those meshes for sub-d work.
But it's really a pretty big mis-match [...] You're going to run into stuff like this all the time unless you greatly restrict the kinds of shapes that you actually attempt to model in MoI.
Yes, such a shape would be impossible to output in this way. And I'd just not try to force it. My goal, really, is to leverage the mesh when and where I can, and in other places just output it looking good and deal with it another way (be that doing traditional retopology work or just baking the complex item onto another via a normal or displacement map). It's really a specialized thing for when and where I think I can cheat the system.
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So notice here that every single vertex in this mesh only has two edges leaving from it, so according to what you wrote they should all be deleted and nothing should remain of this polygon?
According to the letter of what I wrote, yes. But that actually wasn't my intention when writing it; I should have qualified that to mean "vetexes that only have two edges connected to them that are on the interior of a surface and not on the edge." Like a vertex just jutting up in the middle of a surface but not actually having it connected enough to keep the polygons from being shaped oddly. Really, after reading the rest of your message, I'm thinking that when these show up for me is when the adaptive subdivision would kick in, but I've made the settings such a coarse outliner case that it breaks what would have been an edge into just a lonely vertex. Really, it's more my fault for abusing the system in such a way.
I also actually created such a surface (with a complex N-gon edge) for use in creating a specific pattern of displacement on an object. I just exported it at a pretty high resolution and then just used ZBrush to project it onto the simpler SDS object. Worked out very well!
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One thing that sub-d modelers object to is adaptive subdivision - that's where the mesher changes levels of detail to put some more polygons in an area of a surface that has more curvature.
This is really so very true; we don't like it when this happens uncontrolled in the mesh (because it totally throws the smoothing off). I do fully understand why you would want it in MoI's primary meshing function (making renderable items). Just maybe a way to toggle it off for idiots like me.
So, yes, you're right in that MoI works as it should to achieve its intended goals. I'm fully aware I'm breaking the system in ways that are not intended or supported. And I've also been too presumptuous about my ideas on "improvements" to help this method. Again, sorry if I've sounded like I just don't "get it." I know you're trying to tell me (and everyone else) not to get their hopes set too high; and I also know I'm probably broaching on "but Daddy, why not?!" territory. I think I just grabbed onto an interesting (to me at least) thread and just didn't let go. I also didn't fully think through all the ramifications about trying to tweak MoI into working like this in any way other than a happy accident.
