General Page

Patch Size specifies the number of control points along each side of all surface patches. This can only be changed when (All Patches) is selected in the Patch ID box.

If Use plane patches is enabled, patches that have boundaries that lie in a plane represented by true planes and not B-Spline patches. The main advantage of this is that planar patches have no upper limit on the number of sides they may have.

The Rebuild Options panel is used to specify that certain characteristics of the existing surface are preserved when it is rebuilt:

• Preserve boundary network - the patch boundary network (formed by the edges and corners of all the patches) is preserved. The effect is the similar to manually selecting and rebuilding each individual patch.

• Preserve patch settings - if non-default options have been applied to individual patches, these are restored to the equivalent patches in the rebuilt surface. This only occurs in regions where the patch boundary network has not changed since the last build.

• Preserve patch geometry - restores control point positions from patches in the existing surfaces to the equivalent patches in the rebuilt surface, thus preserving the effects of manual surface editing. This only occurs in regions where the patch boundary network has not changed since the last build.

Rebuild Options are only available when rebuilding (All Patches). Note that only two of the three options can be selected at once - rebuilding with all of them selected would have no effect.