Hi niko, it looks like you figured it out before I even posted!

> Is there anything else that I'm missing maybe?

No - just try to keep in mind that polygons are actually little flat faceted things and it is only through some kinds of shading tricks that they give a kind of emulation of a smooth appearance (by blending colors and/or shading normals between their vertices).

If there is some subtle variation in the vertex normals, but a relatively sparse set of polygons in that particular area (or sparse in just one direction with some skinnier polygons which is more what you were running into), the fake illusion of smoothness can be more easily broken. The solution for such things is to produce more polygons so that the illusion of smoothness holds up better.

Long and skinny polygons will have things blending between their vertices across a larger portion of the model, so they can have a tendency to make some more visible artifacts.

- Michael

Hi niko, also is there some reason why you are particularly concerned about making a low polygon result?

You write:
> I set it to 10 and the mesh was fine although very heavy...

It's actually not really very heavy - using angle = 3, and Divide larger than = 10, over here produces a mesh with 44,000 faces in it, which is actually not what I'd call in a "very heavy "category at all:




You're not running on an old 486 computer or anything, right? :) That's pretty light duty for any vaguely modern machine to handle.

If you're going to have something special like a whole fleet of thousands of different ones of these, then certainly you might want to think about the density a bit. But otherwise, you may be worrying a lot about something that you don't really need to worry about for just 1 object.

- Michael

Hi niko, also if you're getting things that look like they're artifacts from long and skinny polygons, you could try the aspect ratio control instead of "Divide larger than".

That will force divisions on polygons that are more than a certain width/height ratio. Like if you put in 10 for "Aspect ratio limit" any UV quad that has one side more than 10 times longer than the short side will get subdivided.

It's pretty helpful for your case for the problem areas, with making a lighter mesh, like this:






But really I would not hesitate so much to just use "Divide larger than" and dice everything up pretty finely.

- Michael

Thanks for your responses Michael.
Yes you are correct!