Hi Mike, it's not necessarily a bad idea to try and make things more regularized for the n-sided patch to work better (it definitely gets easier on it the less extreme amounts of variation it has to deal with), but I don't think that a combination method like you're talking there will be able to work very well. The problem is the surface shaping in the star shape is not good in these areas too (highlighted in yellow here):



Basically the star method often only has a nice shape right at the immediate vicinity of the outside boundary edges only...

Here's a bit more complex example so you can see how just sticking another patch in the middle won't really be an overall solution:




I guess actually thinking a bit about it now after being away from the research for a bit, a big part of how these ridges get formed is that the star blend process starts by putting in some initial curves that connect the outer boundary area to the center point, and then those become the edges of the surfaces that are generated. If those initial central-connecting curves are just a little bit too low or high it will then make for a wave in the surface shape as things both interpolate that curve and also maintain smoothness to their neighboring patch.

The problem is that it's pretty difficult to know how those connecting curves should be shaped from the start, it could be theoretically possible that some kind of iterative method that tunes those central-connecting-curves a bit after each result to reduce wiggles could help improve things. That would involve quite a lot of testing and research work though. As near as I can tell the CAD industry in general has given up on this kind of star blending approach though in favor of the n-sided patch method.

- Michael