Here’s what most CAD tesselators, including Datasmith, currently do with pipes and tubes:
It is the same with fillets and surfaces:
How about in addition to having a “max edge length”, also having a “minimum vertex distance”?
I mean, there’s no reason at all to pack 10 vertices per centimeter into those fillets, while at the same time having the surface between them have 1 vertex per 10 centimeters!
Turns out that Rhino V6 actually has this setting!
And the result is really noticeable, because the above screenshot in the previous post had about 120k triangles, while the one below has 140k, and most of that is in the surfaces and not the fillets:
Still a number of problematic areas though, but at least there’s more settings to tweak in Rhino, and very fast previews of the mesh before you hit OK as well!
Right now, it looks as if Rhino will replace both 3D Studio Max and Datasmith for us when it comes to converting nurbs to meshes…
EDIT: Wow, Rhino even has a maximum aspect ratio setting so it will never do too pointy triangles. Sadly when you enable it, it doesn’t respect the previous “minimum edge length”, so you get a very dense mesh, but with pretty clean topology. Still, there’s potential here I wasn’t even aware of before…
