Hi,

When i break down a mesh to surface and get 416 surface, it's a lot to look at. So, i visually analyze it to see where to join surfaces that are not too large and not too small for the area where they'll represent panels of plating.

But, it's quite tedious, and visually tough when the original surface is just 50' by about 80' of a body that is 560' long and about 80' of height of side shell plating. I manage to group down to some 32 joined surfaces (4 wide x 8 high). But, along the way in doing so, i have to zoom in and out a lot to find where the join actually finishes to make sure i didn't over-select surfaces.

Could there be programmed as a feature a way to alternately color successively joined surfaces? It could be something like telling VCP a user-presumed array of (in my case) 4 x 8, and then VCP could put + marks where it recommends (say, where there are vertices) the colors alternate. Then, the user could choose, or VCP could say "Hey, i notice adjacent shades of other colors are too close to what you want, so let me suggest others on the palette..."

Just an idea...

A finishing thought: As the model subdivision task grows, the overall surfaces could be a patch quilt indicating work finished or whatever. I notice that for that just 32 grids colored, the file size is only 128 kb, and for mirroring the 32 grids, it's about 278 or so kb. But, the lines along are some 3.8 MB. So, getting rid of the lines as i stop needing them would be quite a file size saver!