Q. How can I create an isosurface with fewer polygons than the isosurface module extracts?

A: The isosurface module has a button on it: Optimize Surface which reduces the total polygon count by about half. The reason that this is an option is that the isosurface module produces polytriangle strips for more efficient rendering. It is quicker to just run through the data, creating polygons and stringing them together into polytriangle strips using "cobwebs" (zero area triangles), but this increases the total polygon count (and memory). With Optimize Surface turned on, it creates a graph of the polygons and tries to find efficient polytriangle strips. It takes a little longer, but as I said, the polygon count is usually cut almost in half. It's a user selectable trade-off between surface computation time and rendering time.