When converting Paint Effects to polygons, you can optimize the conversion by keeping some attribute values as low as possible, such as Segments, Leaf Segments, Petal Segments, Sub Segments, Split Max Depth, and Tube Sections. Also the Flatness value should be exactly 1 on leaves and petals as this can dramatically reduce the number of triangles if the Tube Sections value is large.
All the attributes mentioned above are located in different sections of the Paint Effects Brush Settings editor, so it can be time consuming to find and modify them for each brush you want to edit. To save time, we’ve added a Paint Effects Mesh Quality window (Paint Effects > Mesh Quality Attributes).
The Paint Effects Mesh Quality window is a collection of attributes from the selected brush and, where indicated, stroke. It refers to the first valid selection found and only represents one brush at a time. The brush may be selected indirectly through a stroke, a surface that was painted on or a mesh that resulted from converting Paint Effects to polygons.
Changing the segments, Leaf Segments and Petal Segments may change the overall shape of the tubes. You can compensate for this somewhat on leaves and petals by adjusting the leaf and petal Stiffness. For segments you may need to modify Force attributes in the Paint Effects Brush Settings editor.
You can increase the number of sub segments without affecting the tube shape, although this will not remove nickeling as the sub segments are linearly interpolated between the main segments. Sub segments are most useful if the brush has displacement turned on and you want to better resolve the displacement texture with more triangles, but don’t want to affect the overall shape of the tubes. There may be other situations where more triangles are desired, but you don’t want to affect the overall tube shape.
Paint Effects Mesh Quality settings can be useful in simplifying both normal Paint Effects strokes as well as strokes that have been converted to polygons.