This paper presents some results and a small follow-up investigation from an MRI study of vowels [3], in which classical distance-to-area equations [5] were evaluated for implementation in sagittal view articulatory modelling. It was shown that an articulatorily more detailed application of the conversion rules improved the accuracy of the predicted areas, but that this increased realism failed to improve acoustic performance, if midline derivation and vocal tract termination points were kept the same. These results are discussed in relation to articulatory modelling in linguistic research. Work funded by the NIH (R01DC02014) and Stockholm University (SU617023001).