Well, what you said a couple of messages above was:

> I wanted to point out that sometimes poly artifacts can show
> up even when C4D is used to render a moi model imported
> with normals.

If you can post the model, I'll show you how to render it in C4D without any visible artifacts at all.

Most likely the artifacts you were referring to were related to low polygon count and not due to the topology stuff that you are posting screenshots of.

But it's difficult for me to verify this since I cannot test a screenshot. If you were to post the model that would give me something I could test and that would help me give you better feedback.


> I too thought that was what avoid smaller was for, but to no avail.

Avoid smaller than doesn't cause welding to happen as a post-process - what it does is make polygons that are smaller than that threshold distance use a rougher angle than the regular angle setting during the refinement stage of the meshing.

It's for producing lower detail on small sized portions of the model. Say for example you have a model that has a lot of little tiny rounded buttons on it, and you don't want very many polygons on those. You can make those small areas get a lower poly count by using "Avoid smaller than".

Here's an example of a small area that is getting quite a few polygons - this happens because the regular angle parameter is scale independent - it works just off of curvature and not size, so a large size rounded thing and a small sized rounded thing that have the same roundness get the same poly density with just the angle parameter:



That little rounded thing is about 0.5 units across, and so if you wanted that small area to get a lower level of detail you can enter in "Avoid smaller than = 0.5", and that will produce this instead:




It does not force welding to happen as you were thinking...


> My question is, why can't a function to automatically weld points
> within a distance such as the ones circled in

It's somewhat hard to do this and also maintain the accuracy of the mesh adhering to the original NURBS object at the same time.

If points that are too far apart get welded to one another, it produces a kind of divot or bump cutting into the mesh.

The other thing is that kind of welding would not really serve any purpose for rendering, if you post a rendering of the unwelded result that you show there side by side by a welded one, they would be indistinguishable in the actual rendering so long as the imported vertex normals are used.


Once again though, it would really help if you would post the model file of the stuff you are showing instead of only a screenshot.


- Michael