Hi Mark - you should not try to subdivide the model further in your rendering application, that's not going to work right in any rendering program, the output you get from MoI should just be rendered directly and not really edited further. So if you need more polygons you need to increase the density at export time from MoI, not really afterwards.
You can put in an angle tighter than what the slider is set for if you type the number in directly in the "Angle" field in the mesh export dialog.
Also sometimes if you've got a broad shape that is only shallowly curved the angle division mechanism may not divide things enough for your particular purposes - when that happens you need to use one of the other settings on the mesh dialog, primarily the "Divide larger than" setting. You can enter in a distance value there and any polygons larger than that distance will be further broken down. So for example if you put in a value of 2 it will continue subdividing until polygons are less than 2 units across, that can help to give more detail in areas that have only a shallow curvature to them. When you have shallow curvature it means that there is not much deviation between the surface normals in those areas, and so the anglular measurement which divides things based on the angle between surface normals does not divide things very heavily in areas like that.
The "Divide larger than" setting does not come into play when using the slider, you have to enter in a value directly. The reason for this is that the "Divide larger than" setting is scale dependent - the value you that you enter in there depends on the overall scale of your object. The slider only controls the angular measurement, which is scale independent - it works the same on objects just based on their curvature and not on their size.
> My main problem seems to be in getting the surfaces to join up nicely prior to export. I can select the
> whole model and run the join command but some surfaces remain separate.
This usually means that there is too large of a gap between those pieces, things have to be fairly close (within 0.005 units for a regular sized object) to each other before they can be joined.
Sometimes you can just scale your object down and then join, but other times if you have some kind of chaotic or messy edge structures that are not close enough to one another that might mean the model needs to be repaired or reconstructed in those areas. It's hard to give a good recommendation on what to do on this just in the abstract, I would need to see your file to try and help give you much more specific information on this, if you want you can e-mail the file to me at
moi@moi3d.com if you want help with it.
But basically these things you are mentioning re: subdivision and joining are not something that you would solve by going to a different renderer anyway, they sound to me like things that you need to solve on the model in MoI or at export time from MoI with using some more mesh settings.
- Michael
