Hi Chipp,

> 3. I always use the Output: to Triangles only UNLESS Michael tells me quads are ALWAYS coplanar ;-)

Quads on curved surfaces will typically not be coplanar. But usually most rendering programs can handle nonplanar quads by simply splitting them into 2 triangles at render time. It's an easy job to triangulate a quad, it's much more difficult to triangulate a complex n-gon with possibly hundreds of vertices and complex concavities in it. So if your rendering program has not invested a lot of effort in making robust n-gon triangulation you want to avoid n-gons but it's not very typical to need to avoid quads.


> Michael, do you set the smoothing on OBJ polys based on the Angle setting or do you just smooth all polys?

MoI's OBJ export uses vertex normals to control all the smoothing - each polygon gets vertex normals emitted in the OBJ file at its vertices and the normals come from the original NURBS surface data, so the shading will look the same as the original NURBS model.

A "break angle" type mechanism is only used for smooth shading when vertex normals are being created by averaging the face normals of adjacent polygon faces. That does not apply for MoI's case since MoI can get the normals from the original NURBS surface rather than from any polygon face averaging process.

So the angle setting controls just the density of the tessellation, it doesn't control whether smooth shading will happen or not, you will just get creases at areas where your original NURBS model is actually creased and smooth junctures where your original model is smooth.

- Michael