Network surface question

 From:  Michael Gibson
4266.4 In reply to 4266.1 
Hi David,

> When creating a network surface it appears that how
> well the surface matches the curves is dependent on
> the number of control points on the related curves.

No, not really - probably what you were seeing was just a display artifact - part of the process of displaying a surface on the screen involves breaking it down into triangle pieces because your video card only really knows how to display triangles.

2 independent surfaces that are just sitting adjacent to each other can end up with slightly different triangle structures.

Once you join them together to have a shared edge, the triangles will be created with the knowledge of that join so they will have the same triangle structure along that shared edge and that will make for a cleaner display.

Similarly if you join surfaces up it will help to make a better mesh in those areas when exporting to a polygon mesh format like OBJ or LWO.

But in the meantime while you are in the MoI viewport is not too unusual to see a few little glitches here and there in the display - it's not really possible for the display to be perfect because there are various compromises that have to be made in order for it to be fast and responsive. So there are some kinds of little graphical glitches that you should just basically ignore and not really get too worried about. Sometime in the future I will probably be able to tune things up to reduce a few kinds of additional display glitches, but it is a sensitive area for performance - I've got to be careful not to remove glitches at the expense of slowing things down too much.


There is a problem though currently with Network where it can sometimes make a result that is just slightly out of join tolerance because it tries to make things with a little bit lighter accuracy in order to help keep the surface control point density down. If you run into this where the result of a Network will not join to another adjacent piece, you can scale the objects down by 1/10 in size and then join them, see here for some more info on that:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3939.2


- Michael