I was working on this animation in 3Ds Max... [img_inline caption="Figure 1:
Tessellation
of a
Hexagon" height="200"]http://geometricarts.googlepages.com/spier.jpg/spier-full.jpg[/img_inline]
I was making a cylinder into a baseball bat for whatever reason, so I added 'Tessellate' to make it smoother. I clicked on 'add iterations' to make it smoother and I accidentally set it to 4. (0 is none, 9 is Tessellation to the Ninth Power for each Polygon.) The number of Polygons of my model shot from 120 to 12,000,000 and the program crashed, wasting 5 hours of work.
Being the person I am, I could care less. I just went "Nooooooooooo!!!! Oh well." and did something else. No amount of screaming or beating children will bring it back.
-At least in my case it doesn't make the pain go away.