Hi PP - so the first thing is I notice that you have attached a LWO mesh file.

You should intead use OBJ format for transferring your model into Carrara - that will allow a piece of data called "vertex normals" to be read into Carrara and that will help out a lot with getting a better quality shading on your object.

Vertex normals are a relatively new thing in LWO files, and the only programs that read vertex normals out of an LWO file are Modo and LightWave - other programs will not see them and you will be missing this important piece of shading information.

So that's the first thing - use OBJ format instead of LWO format for transfer into Carrara.


Then the other thing is what Eddi mentions above - when you have a shape that is large but only shallowly curved, you may need to adjust some mesh settings to break the generated mesh down into more pieces. The basic slider on the export dialog controls an angle parameter, but when you have something that is only shallowly curved breaking things down by angle alone may not give it enough polygons.

The "Divide larger than" parameter is a distance value that you can enter which will cause any polygons larger than the given distance to be broken down further.

The value that you use depends on the scale of your model. Your model is at a rather small size (you may want to actually model things at a bit larger scale than this, because modeling things at a small size can lead to some problems), so a value of something around 0.05 would be good.

Note here that when I use a value of "Divide larger than" = 0.05 when exporting how many more polygons are created for your shape?



That along with using OBJ format will also help make a better rendering for you in Carrara - raytraced shadows in particular don't really work very well with polygons that are too rough and jagged. If you still see any issues, then try using an even smaller value for "Divide larger than" to create more polygons yet.

- Michael