Hi Rich,

> I remember the advice some time ago was to import
> LWO rather than OBJ, was that related to this issue?

Using LWO instead of OBJ only applied to Modo, not to Cinema4D - for Cinema4D it's always been best to use OBJ format.

Cinema4D's LWO importer does not know how to read vertex normals out of the LWO file, since that's kind of a newish thing for that particular format. Getting normals from LWO format only works with Modo or with the newer versions of LightWave, something like LW 9.6 and up.

- Michael