Hi Dan,
> For example, if I do a boolean union on the sticks (which
> presumably just touch each other at their points) and the
> atoms in the lattice, would that make life easier for MoI?
Probably not from a display speed standpoint. Probably it would make things a bit more complex since when you do a boolean more edges are created and the geometry is somewhat more complex with more edges.
> Can I do anything to speed things up?
A couple of things - first you can adjust the display mesh density to be coarser. By default MoI creates a rather dense display mesh which looks nice but which generates a lot of polygons.
To reduce the display mesh density, go to Options > View > Meshing parameters, and set "Mesh angle" to a coarser angle like 20 degrees, and uncheck "Add detail to inflections". That will make for a somewhat rougher display on the screen but also reduce polygon count and speed things up.
Also drawing edges can tend to be more time consuming than surfaces, so you may want to hide all edges to get a display speed boost. In v2 you can do that quickly by going to the "Types" section in the Scene Browser, which lets you access all objects of a certain type in the model, like all solids, all curves, etc... - there is also an "Edges" entry there and if you click the little eye icon next to Edges it will hide all edges.
Also turn off the hidden-line display, that's available in v2 in the View palette - checkbox labeled "Display hidden lines".
If you do want to take a MoI screenshot as your render, it is possible to generate a higher resolution image to the clipboard. If you then shrink that down in an image editor it will tend to look nicer - check out this previous post for the higher res screenshot script:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1049.5
- Michael