Hi Brian, maybe 3D coat is different, but it is not unusual for a program that focuses on doing displacement of mesh vertices to expect to work on a mesh that is subdivided into small pieces.

Sometimes there may be tools to do subdivision inside the detailing program itself, but by that time the original NURBS object is not present in there, so it can be better to do the subdivision as a more initial step when you export from MoI, since MoI has the original NURBS data.

That allows MoI to place the subdivided points directly along those surfaces. Instead what may happen if the subdivision is done only on polygon data is that it may use a kind of "cooked up" smoothing which may cause intentional sharp edges to be lost or it may subdivided polygon into flat regions which kind of makes a shape with flat pieces in it like this example.

Definitely with ZBrush it works better to subdivide at export time from MoI. I thought it did with 3D Coat too but I'm not completely sure about that.

- Michael