I been experimenting with xmesh the past few days. Though it’s a great tool i noticed something. The created Xmesh is composed of triangles, no matter what the original mesh had.
This eliminates the ability to add a modifier such as turbosmooth on the Xmesh. In general, i would prefer to cashe the medium poly quad geometry and then apply the turbosmooth modifier on the Xmesh, rather than having to cache the already smoothed (via turbosmooth) model, which makes both the xmesh more heavy on disk space, and on viewport performance.
Is there a way to cache geometry and maintain it’s original quads? and if not currently, are you planning to add such an option?
The short answer is - XMesh MX grabs the TriMesh that the Renderer gets.
All Max renderers expects triangle meshes, and that’s what all Max objects use internally when sending data for rendering. XMesh was designed as a “Mesh Renderer”, it intercepts the actual triangulated data Default Scanline or VRay would get from an object, even including the (slow) Max render-time displacement and anything else that would happen at render time. This was done mainly to ensure that the rendering result would always be consistent and match 100% what Max would render without the intermediate XMesh caching.
That being said, XMesh is capable of storing polygons (as far as I know), but I will leave it to Paul, the XMesh senior developer, to explain in detail.
Yes, XMesh can handle polymeshes, but currently it deals mostly with triangle meshes, as Bobo described. The XMesh Saver has a scripted command for saving a polymesh file: