Hi Keith,

Hopefully this will help a bit. Consider the below image:

PIC 1

At the default Mesh Option settings with an Angle of 12 (dot 1), you can see there are lots of large triangles on curved surfaces, which when rendered ABSOLUTELY WILL cause artifacts using any polygon renderer. The angle determines how and when to break up curved surfaces. As you can see (2) the surface outline is most facetted, which won't look good unless you are creating a very small render or building for games. This setting creates a very small model size (3), only 34K polys.

PIC 2

By just decreasing the angle (4), we can create more polys along the curve (5), which will render somewhat better. But we still have those pesky triangles and it would be nice if we could raise the number of polys on the longer curves (5). Note decreasing the angle increased the file size to 106K polys.

PIC 3

So, to get rid of the long problem triangles, we typically need to fiddle with the Divide larger than number. Here we've set it to .2 (dot 7) which means any polygon larger than .2 units on any size will automatically be divided. Wow it's very smooth! (8) We set the dropdown to All, but we could also set it to Curved since there aren't any flat planes in this model. As a rule, I typically set it to All unless either a) the geometry is regular (boxes w/out slow curved surfaces); or b) I want to use micro-beveling in KeyShot (which doesn't work well with small flat polys on the same plane). This setting turns out is overkill for this model and the poly count is up to a whopping 182K! More polys = longer renders and slower performance ;-)

PIC 4

This is a pretty good setting for this model to be rendered at a fairly high quality. The Divide larger than is set to .5 (dot 10) and the model should be exported as OBJ and import fairly well into most rendering packages. Fairly decent curve resolution (11) and a poly count of 120K.


The exported OBJ can be found here.