Subject: Re: Flat Polygon error?
From: [email-masked]
To: LightWave Mailing List <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 7 Jul 1995 11:50:51 -0400

On Thu, 6 Jul 1995 [email-masked] wrote:

> Does anybody know why these polygons are sticking out like this?

Are you seeing the non-smoothed polygons along the side (profile) of the 
object?  If so, this is normal...LightWave will only give the appearance 
of smoothed polygons when looking directly at the them.  In other words, 
if you make a ball with very few polygons in it and smoothing turned on, 
the part of the ball that's closest to you will be smoothed nicely, but 
the edge (profile) of the ball will still have many straight edges and it 
will be obvious that it is a very crude object.  The way to get around 
this is to use the Polygon/Subdivide tools in modeler, or to just 
allocate more subdivisions to the object when orginally modeling it.

> Does it have something to do with the flatness limit set in Modeller?

This is possible too...hard to tell without seeing the actual image 
you're referring to...if the "errors" are not occurring along the sides 
of you object, then you may be able to correct the problem by raising the 
Smoothing Angle percentage.  

Or, it may just be a modeling error, such as a non-planar polygon...the 
Skin function in modeler is notorious for arranging polygons in such a 
way as to really mess up your surfaces....I read the Toothpaste tutorial, 
but didn't bother doing it since it was a fairly simple object to 
model...seems to me like this object should have been well within the 
Skin function's ability to handle.  I usually don't run into problems 
until I'm modeling something complex, like a character's head.

If you're still having problems correctly this, then perhaps you could 
upload an image to an FTP site or UUCP encode it via e-mail directly to 
me (and NOT to the rest of the mailing list!) and I'm sure I can tell you 
what the problem is.  Pretty sure, anyways.  =)

                                      -David Warner
                                       Event Horizon Graphics

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