Newbie question - bad banding

[danclarkwcp]

I am a complete newbie to KS, coming from a commercial photography background. We are doing some test renders with client-supplied files, and are getting some bad banding/uneven curves. These are OBJ files, but I have no idea if they came from the same original source, or how many hands they passed through before getting to us. I'm thinking this may be a tessellation issue, but that's a complete guess. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Here's a set of sample renders, if I can figure out how to post images:

[guest84672]

It is poor tessellation. Hit H and see how many polygons you have. Also apply the Wireframe material so you can see the actual polygons.

[danclarkwcp]

Wow, that was a very interesting experiment! The problem file has 260,312 triangles (I'm assuming triangles=polygons), the smoother-rendering file has 1,014,396. I also rendered wireframe images of both, and the difference is quite obvious. Interestingly, the files are almost the same size as each other (both about 38Mb), so I guess I can't make an assumption of the file quality based on file size alone.

So, what's my best course of action from here? I don't have any modeling programs, and am dependent on getting files from our client, who gets them from their agency, who gets them from their 3D artist (and there may be more people in the chain who I don't know about). My understanding is that I can't take an OBJ file into a 3D program, and redo the tessellation amount. Am I better off asking for a  higher tessellation OBJ export, or asking for a different file format (one that doesn't have a tessellation issue)? In case it matters, I'm using KS on a Mac.

TIA,
Dan
www.weinberg-clark.com

[guest84672]

Well - either you ask for more polygons, i.e. higher tessellation, or the original file. Depending on what file format it is we may be able to read in the native format and tessellate ourselves.

KeyShot can handle large amounts of data with ease, so the more ploys you can get, the better.