Angular Tolerance

Angular Tolerance is the maximum angular deviation allowed between an analytical surface and its triangulation. Pairs of triangles cannot incorporate a dihedral angle greater than this amount. These units are expressed in degrees.

This setting determines the minimum number of faces that may represent the circumference of a true cylinder, regardless of the Chord Height Tolerance setting. Medium and small objects relative to the total scene bounding box may easily fall within surface tolerance tessellation tolerances with perhaps only four or five sides representing a true cylindrical surface. Therefore, by using this tolerance setting you are controlling the “coarseness” of tessellation regardless of the geometry’s relative size in the scene. For example, an angle of 30 results in a 12 sided tessellated cylinder, and an angle of 45 results in an 8 sided tessellated cylinder.

In the images below, the first has an angular tolerance of 30; the second has a tolerance of 5 and contains has many more polygons than the first.