I have a Rhino model which is made up of all polysurfaces. I want to export it into 3D max for rendering purposes. The problem is that the file size is quite large (around 500mb) and I can see that some of the polysurfaces are made up of a lot of polygons. Am I right in thinking that if i convert all the polysurfaces to meshes before exporting then the file will be much smaller? Im still a basic user of rhino so I am not totally sure when is better to use meshes or polysurfaces, so any advice would be appreciated! Thanks!
Hi Chris - Exporting to Max will generally be meshes, whether you start the export with meshes in Rhino or not. The advantage, possibly, of converting to meshes first (Mesh command) is that you can get better control of the mesh parameters per object if need be, and try again if the object is meshed too densely, or whatever. See https://wiki.mcneel.com/rhino/meshfaq
Great, thanks a lot for your help. Will try that. Just another quick question, I have some closed polysurfaces which are made up of a lot of polygons which in turn make the file quite large. Is there any way to reduce the number of polygons in a polysurface? I know with meshes you can adjust this parameter so was wondering if possible to do this with polysurfaces.
Hi Chris - in Rhinospeak, if an object is a polysurface, it has no polygons - those are for mesh objects. If your object has coplanar contiguous faces, try MergeAllFaces to consolidate them before Meshing the objects for export.
Ah ok, sorry Im still not totally used to Rhino yet. I just saw that I can type PolygonCount and then when I click on the polysurface it gives me a number of polygons for that surface, so I assumed that this was the total number which I hoped I could reduce somehow.