Mike Abbott

When I saw your first post I thought 'Just wait until Bob gets to the bevelling...' : )

It's not a Houdini issue as such, just the nature of polygon based modelling vs NURBS. With NURBS you've got the precision and relative ease of bevelling etc - but at the cost of requiring a more structured and precision approach. Polys allow that push, pull, deform freedom, but at the cost of frequently requiring some careful construction planning or topology wrangling to make things like bevels work.

I think you'll find that if you're going to melt / morph this, the more formal style of polygon topology - all neat quads etc - can often take a back seat as Houdini will often be using a triangulated mesh, or VDB volumes for simulation processes. So, I wouldn't sweat the topology at this stage.

My guess: There is a colour management issue somewhere in the system. To me it sounds like the values have been distorted.

achrist3
Aha! Thanks for the ideas. It sounds like STL is not the super advanced file format I was imagining.

Anything but. I'm old enough to know its been around since the early 1990's : )