What's the point of defeaturing?

[roberteker (RobertED)]

@ThomasC_Epic

Thanks for the feedback. Agree that working on NURBS data can produce better results in many cases.
We have many users that get data already tessellated and need to remove mechanical form features on triangle meshes, that’s why we have the defeaturing technique working on meshes.
In order to have better gains, it’s often recommended to use decimation afterwards. In the example above, the mesh reduction tool should remove most of the coplanar triangles without visual quality loss.

Thank you for the reply! I wasn’t aware of the “mesh reduction tool” you mention. Usually, for CAD imported surfaces, this destroys the custom split normals that tesselation produce, so if Unreal’s tool doesn’t do this, that’s an improvement.

Since I work with double-curvature surfaces which can still have holes in them, I’ve switched to defeaturing in Rhino for now.