Hi Bruell, welcome to the forum and to MoI!
> Is there an option to determine the resolution of how
> the curved faces are being split up (how many increments
> in the curve) when importing the skp file?
Yes - when you export to .skp format, the Meshing options dialog will be shown which has various options for controlling the density.
More details on how the meshing options work here:
http://moi3d.com/1.0/docs/moi_command_reference10.htm#meshdialog
By moving the slider or adjusting the other options you can generate either a coarse low-polygon version of your MoI object to the .skp file, or generate a higher detailed but heavier version for something like a final rendering.
MoI works on curved objects so it is kind of different than SketchUp - when you create a circular type object in MoI it is an actual circular object so you don't have to decide at creation time how many sides you want it to have, you can decide that later on when you export to a polygon-based file format.
That allows you to export many different density versions of your same base MoI object, you don't have to specify the density at creation time unlike what you are used to doing in SketchUp. The bad part about doing it at creation time is that it kind of "locks in" that density for that shape and it is not typically easy to go back later on and change it since SketchUp only knows about lines, it doesn't know that a bunch of lines actually initially came from a circle...
> This geometry would be quite simple to do in sketchup from scratch
Yeah, it's not a complex model so doing it from scratch in almost anything is certainly not out of the question.
However, a model like this that involves cutting several pieces by profile curves will come together extremely fast in MoI, probably something like only 1 minute to completely finish that shape from scratch. Maybe I will have to make a video to really show what I am talking about here...
But don't get me wrong - SketchUp has its own different kinds of strengths and speed in different kinds of situations as well.
- Michael