Hi anthony,

> it may be nice to be able to see the actual surface mesh
> in moi though based on what you are saying.

You mean the surface control points? You can do that in MoI by separating out the surface so that it's not joined to anything else and then you can turn on the control point cage with Edit > Show pts.

But that shows you the control polygon hull of the surface - the surface itself is a smooth spline that is influenced by those hull points.

Your video card does not know how to show a mathematically continuous spline directly - any program that you load the surface into is going to need to break it down into triangles in order to display it just like MoI does, and most of the time they do it actually quite a bit rougher than MoI does. That kind of slightly jagged angular type silhouette is a pervasive type of display artifact that's common to pretty much all CAD programs.

It's just not something to really worry about so much - as long as the only thing that looks weird is a slight angularity but things are not leaking grossly outside of boundaries or look like pieces are sticking through each other then it's pretty safe to assume that you're just seeing a slightly coarse display mesh in that particular area.


> at least to be able to check the real thing without having to
> go to another program

Normally the best way to check it in MoI is to export to a polygon mesh format like OBJ for example and then crank the export mesh density way up. The export mesher does not take shortcuts with how it analyzes the mesh and decides to subdivide it, so you can use it to generate a more accurate polygon representation and examine that. But you won't be able to use that method with the "no save" version though, since it relies on going through the process of saving to a poly format.

- Michael