Have you used the update button?

>> The dialog box provides a combination of parameters but I do not know how to set them to produce a clean and simple SubD mesh.

Hi Mark

The Convert To Mesh option creates a facetted body with all triangles or a mixture of triangles & quads. There is not an option to create a quad only mesh.

The Mixed/Fringe 1 option will produce the most quads, but not all quads. This creates triangle facets along all face boundaries(the "fringe"). Attached is an image with Fringe1 and Fringe2 faceting.

I think a clean simple SubD mesh would be all smoothly flowing quads. Something you would get from using SubD tools to create the model.

PowerPack has a bunch of tools to manipulate meshes. I use them to tweak meshes into better subd models for conversion to solids. But it is far from automatic . There are apps out there that will create a good "automatic" SUBD mesh from an arbitrary mesh such 3d-coat or z brush. They use a technique called remeshing which rebuilds a subd mesh from an existing mesh.

This link below has some videos showing some of the techniques I've found useful including a video about Retopology and 3D-Coat that might be of interest.
http://masterviacad.com/powerpackoverview/ppvideos/ppvideos.html



Tim

Edited by user Friday, February 26, 2016 1:51:42 PM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified