Michael you're getting your posts confused, this is Simlab, Maxwell is next door ;)

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Hi Danny - ooops, I was getting things crossed! But actually it still kind of applies - probably Simlab does not like to handle complex n-gons either so you would still probably want to switch from "Export : N-gons" to "Export : Quads & Triangles" for exporting out to Simlab.

Several rendering programs are just not accustomed to processing complex n-gons, MoI is pretty much the only program out there that can generate them in large quantities so it's sometimes not a very well tested area in the receiving program.

- Michael

That's correct Michael, Quads & Triangles for Simlab. It seems only CD4 handles N-gons do you or anyone else know of other renderers/poly modellers that handle N-gons?

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Seems Modo handles N gons and now Blender ;)

Hi Danny, Modo and LightWave handle n-gons pretty well too, and 3DS Max does as long as you use FBX format.

A lot of the programs that are focused more directly on rendering only and not on poly modeling + rendering don't seem to handle them though.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

I guess there's no need for rendering programs to handle N-gons maybe more suited for manipulating in the poly modellers.

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Hi Danny, yeah I think that's true. The poly modelers will do more things in wireframe display mode and do more kinds of polygon level processing like uv mapping which can benefit more from more organization to the polygon structure.

- Michael

>I guess there's no need for rendering programs to handle N-gons maybe more suited for manipulating in the poly >modellers.

Hi Danny,

sure there is, for example if you like to render Voronoi meshes...

http://i.minus.com/ibrZbYPGBZn1wE.jpg

(rendered in Shade)

Regards
Stefan

Hi Stefan,

That's cool, however couldn't you just map that to your quad and triangle mesh ?

Cheers

Hi Danny,

well, in my case i can not. I know there are 3D programs out there which for example have procedural Voronoi Shaders, which could be applied to a mesh. In the picture however i used Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation with a Density Field applied, so that you have more uniform Voronoi cells and smaller cells in denser areas, which regular 3D programs AFAIK can't create.

Best regards
Stefan

Wings 3D (free) have some voronoï possibilities :)
See the videos (it's the creator of the Manifold lab for Wings 3D !




Blender also ;)