How to nicely render mathematical object made from slices I want to render a certain geometrical object for a scientific paper. It should look nice, but the main point is that I want to make the shape as evident as possible. I would like to get a result similar to what one would get with Jmol (though I would hope for a much nicer look).

You can take a look at the shape here. For those who know about this stuff, it is sort of like a smoothed cuboctahedron. It has two kinds of "faces", triangular ones and square ones. I would like that to be clearly visible in the render.

Maybe it helps to know how the mesh was created. I generated each slice of the solid along the z-axis and wrote a script to generate the whole mesh. Maybe the reason why I can't seem to get a nice looking render is related to the way I generated the mesh? Or maybe I am just very incompetent in dealing with Blender (most likely this is the case).

Any help would be welcome!
In edit mode, with all geometry selected hit Ctrl+N to recalculate the face normals, they are doing crazy things. This unifies their direction.

A render of the cuboc you provided, with light spheres (Cycles Emission material) placed at incident angles with respect to the faces they are intended to highlight.



You have more Z slices, than XY steps around the object, this produces elongated polygons, and is one reason why you won't get smooth surfaces. You will get neater results if you can generate more points per z-slice, resulting in the polygons being closer to square shapes. Either that or fewer Z slices, but then you loose detail.