Hi Michael,

Thanks as always for your assistance, particularly as MoI isn't the issue here.

>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.

...and that is precisely what every piece of 3D software I've tried tonight appears to be doing. It seems that some software will import the vertex normals but then can't export the materials, others like UU3D can export the normals but not import them. Very frustrating.

>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.

I have made a point of triangulating everything I export for this project to keep
track of the 90k poly limit I have been set.

>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.

I have also been doing that a lot too and it is very handy. Even so, that 90k poly
limit and a model with a fair bit of detail isn't helping the shading issue
much :(

>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.

Have tried that too on some software. Will try it on every piece of software if I
don't get lucky soon.

>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 and Blender

I have a fair bit of experience with trueSpace and have V5/6 and now 7+. tS I/O has always been pretty dire with obj being seriously ordinary. I tried it anyway and the inbuilt tS obj importer mirrored my model, reversed some of my faces and turned some parts inside out. Oh, and it got the shading wrong too. A third party plugin faired a little better but still no cigar.

No joy with Blender yet either. The only importer that seems close is Anthony D'Agostino's lwo importer which shades beautifully but drops all my materials.

I'm downloading Silo now. If anyone knows of a free or relatively inexpensive app which can import and export accurate obj's I would be very pleased to hear about it.