I think the original idea of the Rhino translator was that it could extract the display mesh from the 3DM file. So you shouldn't have to extract the meshes yourself. But it never worked as it was supposed to. I complained about this on the discussion forum, but was never responded to by any moderator... Luxology has said the final version of the translator will have many improvements based on user requests, but we never saw an update to the beta plugin so we don't know what was fixed or not fixed. Who knows if they were addressing any user problems. Let's wait and see what happens... As a Rhino user, i see little reason to use the translator to go from Rhino to Modo unless they have added 2 of my requests -

1) converting Rhino's "named views" to camera objects.
2) importing of Rhino lights and Environment.

Then it would make Modo a viable solution for render composite work. And this will be very interesting now that Modo will have a fiber generator, something that no Rhino engine has at this moment...

And going from Modo to Rhino, I hope they will automatically bake/assign/export materials into the RDK material format (rtml) and not use the basic Rhino material. If they do not write directly to the rmtl format, then all materials will have to be rebuilt by hand in Rhino. So there would be no advantage. This is one area where i think Modo falls short, that you cant automatically bake all textures for a scene and have the maps reassigned to the shaders in a one-click operation. And of course, exporting cameras to Rhino's named views, and exporting lights are necessary as well. Rhino's SDK can support all of these things. It's up to Luxology if they want this translator to be truly production ready or not. Otherwise, we might as well use OBJ or LWO... Sorry i know this is not related to MoI, but just my thoughts on the subject!

jonah


ALSO - Not sure what all the hype is around NEXUS architecture. Aren't most modern programs just a core with lots of plugins attached? What makes NEXUS any different?