Hi Rich,

here's an (old) example from a modo Artist (sorry don't remember her name) were she used gradients on a polygon mesh (28.000 quads) as you can see the surface is smooth. The only thing, if i'm not mistaken, is you have to watch out for the export settings in MoI (density of polygons) if you really want to print really high resolution images, to see not a "facetted" look. You may have to create also a UV map in your 3D app to apply for example color gradients from images to your surface. Or as you mentioned use shaders in your 3D app, which provide color gradient creation functions.



Regards
Stefan