Hi PaQ, so another demonstration using your example file, using hemispheric lighting in MoI.

If you have a small number of polygons (here writing out to an OBJ file) like this:



Then you can more easily see the kinds of shading artifacts like this:



If you have a much denser number of polygons where each polygon is getting closer to the size of a pixel like this:




Then those shading glitches are greatly reduced - the image now comes closer to reproducing the actual NURBS surface:



If you want to have more 100% perfect shading without even little tiny artifacts you have to generate more polygons and not have ones that span larger rendered areas of the screen. For things like a cone you're probably getting some kind of longer skinnier ones by default unless you use the "Divide larger than" option to dice them up in the straight direction.

Or you could try to use a renderer that knows how to render NURBS surface data in a more direct manner like PRMan...


It seems to me that you're not liking how polygons work though - little flat things emulating curved surfaces just have some problems that go along with that...


You can actually get a pretty big improvement with just a bit of extra dicing actually - for example here with angle = 12:






Then with Divide larger than: 5 to dice long things up just a bit more:






But the other factor is that you may not want to obsess too much about making any real-time video card generated view perfect, a full renderer is going to take more care to do a more proper interpolation on things and can avoid some kinds of artifacts that are present in a real time view.


- Michael