The PolyMesh plugin allows to have polygonal meshes created, edited and rendered within AoI. A "polygonal" mesh is a mesh the faces of which consist in polygons. Quad meshes are a particular kind of polygonal meshes. Thus, the PolyMesh plugin can be used to work with quad meshes.

Why polygonal meshes in AoI? AoI native mesh format is triangular meshes. Triangular meshes are not only the "lowest" kind of polygonal meshes, they also have a special property: their faces are naturally flat. Since an AoI renderer needs the surface to be rendered to be broken in elementary flat pieces (triangles again), triangular meshes just have to list their triangles to the renderer. AoI triangular meshes also have a unique and very interesting feature: they can subdivide themselves in order to provide a smooth surface. Subdivision is very flexible and is governed by extensive smoothness parameters. This way, a complex surface can be generated using a very limited number of faces. However, triangular meshes have a drawback: modeling such meshes are not very natural and indeed the so called box "modelling technique" is difficult to transpose to triangular meshes.

The PolyMesh plugin aims at providing polygonal mesh editing feature to AoI while at the same time keeping all of the powerful aspects of AoI triangular meshes. To this end (and let's be honest: for convenience as well...), polymeshes are built upon to triangular meshes. That is to say a polygonal mesh is translated in a triangular mesh prior to rendering operations.

One last word about the PolyMesh plugin genesis. Many AoI users use Wings for mesh modeling purposes. Wings is powerful, its interface is generally intuitive and I found it quite easy to come up with the intended result. So instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, the initial goal was more or less to transpose Wings to AoI, or rather to bring Wings features to AoI. At the same time, it was obvious that the polygonal mesh editor had to adopt a workflow similar to the one of the triangular mesh editor, for the sake of consistency. And of course, I introduced some features of my own in the process. So the PolyMesh plugin is a mixture of three components: original AoI mesh editing tools, and more generally "look'n'feel", Wings features and personal stuff.