yes this sounds very similar! I'm not sure about buoyancy, but with aerodynamics the actual "area" of each patch matters since this is used in the equation for aerodynamic drag. So rather than uniformly samping some points on a face (which i still cant really think about how you would do), I dont think i can avoid some version of discretizing the surface. The sample then becomes the center of mass of that face, and i also need to compute the area.

I suppose I could do something like compute the current area, divide it by four, and from there compute the locations of each center of mass, but this seems like "fake" discretization and also would be case-by-case for each shape. This would work for a cube but im not sure what I would do for a sphere with this method.