> these types of meshes that you get from MOI will not display correctly
> as they are very dense in some parts and empty in other areas which
> renders these 'automatic' methods useless. (unless you use really high
> settings, all quads, and even spacing between points)

Hi Gent, thanks for the excellent description and comparison!

One other note I'd like to add - if for some reason you know that you will need to use an automatic normal calculation, there is one other thing that you can do to prevent the "shading bleeding" type problem, which is to turn welding off when you export the mesh.

With welding off, the polygons for each surface will have their own individual vertices along the common edges - they will be stacked on top of each other, but separate.

Since those unwelded polygons don't share vertices between each other, the automatic vertex normal averaging won't include polygons from the other surface. On the other hand even though it prevents bleeding it kind of causes a reverse problem that the edges will probably get slightly accented with a kind of slight shading break at a common edge that is supposed to be smooth, but it is probably preferable to the bleeding.

But anyway that option can have an effect on normal calculation as well.

Of course the best is to use the accurate normals and get the really nice shading!

- Michael