Hi Mark,

> Correct, i have added my texture using Ultimate Unwrap 3D
> and that has worked fine. However, I believe UU3D is not
> importing the face normals (is that what they are called?)
> from MoI's obj export or if it is that it isn't doing it very well.

Close - those are called "vertex normals", and yes if you don't get the same kind of shading that you see in MoI that's usually an indication that those normals are not coming through and instead have been cooked up on the other side just by an averaging process.


> I have just found a function in the UU3D menu called "Autosmooth
> Faces" which has an "angle" option. Using that the ogl preview and
> export improves markedly but it still isn't as good as the original
> Moi obj (which is perfect).

A couple of other things you may try are to not export n-gons (which some things are not set up to handle) and instead export with Output: Quads & Triangles.

Also if you use the "Divide larger than" option to cause your output mesh to be divided up into more evenly sized pieces, it can help to reduce shading glitches when the true normals are not going through.

You may also experiment with turning off the "Weld vertices along edges" option at export time as well - I have seen at least one program before that ignores vertex normals if the mesh is welded.


Other than that, maybe another possibility would be to use some different rendering program to assign textures and then export to Max from there.

2 free options which could possibly work are trueSpace (http://www.caligari.com/downloads.html), and Blender (http://www.blender.org/).

It can often times be difficult to get full materials to transfer between programs properly though... You may be in for an uphill battle to get it perfectly set up for Max without actually making it Max.

- Michael