CompuServe Messages

LightWave doesn't care if polygons are not planar. It calculates the normal the same way for any triangle or better. In fact, it's quite common to see people using non-planar polygons in LW as "fillets" to take the hard edge off seams and gaps. Of course, once you start getting *very* non-planar, the polygon doesn't render very well. On a related topic, the choice of points for the first, second and last points on a polygon can make a big difference in shading. Calculating normals at each corner of a polygon can result in differences at the "thousandths" level of floating point, which can make a difference in the color of resulting pixels.