Hi Sven,

> Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought this happened at
> render time, in the viewport the model would be much lighter
> and easier to handle.

It will happen any time the surface is shown as a shaded display - it would only not happen in a viewport if the viewport was showing a wireframe display with no shading in it at all.

For example if in Rhino you switch the viewport display from wireframe to shaded, you will see a message that says:
"Creating rendering meshes... Press Esc to cancel"

There are a few other programs do create a special custom mesh at every render frame so that they can make a customized one that adapts itself to that exact view. But Rhino does not do that, since it tends to be a time consuming operation to create meshes over and over again.


> It looks clean and smooth inside MOI, but I see no way transferring
> it anywhere where i can use a decent renderer to generate a nice
> picture from that - <...>

Why would you think that?

You can get a great picture from any pretty much any renderer of that, just look in the MoI gallery for a whole bunch of examples of just that kind of stuff with a variety of renderers: http://moi3d.com/gallery/

Just make sure you are doing the import properly - you need to use a format that supports vertex normals like OBJ, and if there is an option for reading in vertex normals, make sure that option is enabled.

If you are using XSI, that's an option called "Import Normals as User Normals", make sure it is turned on.

There is a previous discussion and some example of importing MoI models specifically into XSI here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=656.15

As you can see in the screenshot in the second message down there, if you enable reading in vertex normals you can get a perfect shading of your object since the shading will come from normals that were calculated from the NURBS surface, rather than just being averaged from all the adjacent polygon normals.


> So back to the star-cut-from-sphere-problem - is there any solution for this?

Your example there looks similar to the kind of stuff that you will get if you do not read in the vertex normals from the file.

What was your setting for the "Import Normals as User Normals" in that case, enabled or disabled?

Also can you please post the .3DM model file of your star? That will let me show you a few quick examples of how your exact model looks in a few different renderers.

- Michael