On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 5:49 AM, Armin Hornung <HornungA@informatik.uni-freiburg.de> wrote:
Hi!

I have a few meshes which I converted from VRML to STL to be rendered as
robot body parts (specified in the robot's URDF). Is it possible to make
the RViz rendering more "smooth"? A different Ogre-based rendering tool
displays the curvatures very smooth, while RViz seems to display each
triangle as a flat surface (no interpolation of the surface normals). If
I look at the meshes in Meshlab, the RViz view corresponds to "flat",
while what I want to achieve corresponds to "smooth". Maybe there is a
setting that I need to activate in the Mesh file or the URDF?

rviz will use whatever normals are specified in the STL file, unless they're magnitude 0 (and thus invalid... a lot of tools don't write normals into STL files), in which case it calculates the face normal.