Mesh Settings VRay for Rhino

NURBS to Mesh
In order to render an image, whether its a final rendering or just in the viewport, Rhino needs to change the NURBS geometry into a mesh. Within Rhino you can control this mesh, but its important to remember that there are two different functions which that mesh is going to affect. The first function is going to be using the mesh within the viewport. For this it is important to try to have as simple a mesh as possible, or in other words fewer faces, because it will be less intesive for the graphics card and it will be much easier to move around the model. For the second function of producing renderings the mesh needs to be much more refined, or have many more faces. What is recommended is to work with a very simple mesh so that the model is resonable to work with, and then when it is time to render refine the settings so that you can achieve a better result.

30 degree and 4 degree mesh

Changing the Mesh Settings

In order to change the mesh settings type Options into the command line. Then under Document Properties click on Mesh. There are two presets which are Jagged & Faster and Smooth & Slower. The default is Jagged & Faster, and for most applications this is just fine. If you are having the problem with faces being out of line in the veiwport (the faces are shown in a different place that the isocurves) and it is efffecting your work then change the settings to Smooth & Slower. For rendering it will produce better results by having a mesh that is more refined than the Smooth & Slower settings. To change this click on Custom and the settings that were locked with the presets can now be changed. Maximum angle is the most important setting because the angle is what is going to dictate the smoothness of the mesh. Therefore, the smaller the angle in the mesh the smoother the result will be. Changing the settings of the mesh is fine for rendering, but working with a mesh other than one of the preset options may cause your graphics card to slow down significantly or not be able to render the mesh in viewport.
Rendering w/ 30 degree mesh

Rendering w/ 4 degree mesh

Why Change the Mesh?

There are several reasons why refining the mesh is important especially in VRay. The first is that a rough mesh will produce a rough rendering no matter how good the antialiasing. The second is that there will be more noise with a rougher mesh because it all of the bounces are only being calulated for a limited number of angles. There will also be more noise around the edges because of the sudden changes in the mesh. The last reason is the most important and this is that a more refined mesh will produce more accurate bounces. This will produce smoother more realistic results. The only downfall is that because of all these different angles it may take slightly longer to calculate those bounces. It also may take longer to calculate antialiasing, but if you are using the Adaptive Subdivision sampler than the time increase should be minimal.
Samples from 30 degree and 4 degree mesh