Hi macray,

> Usually I just delete the Normal Tag

But if you do this, don't you lose the accurate vertex normals?

To get the best quality shading without any kind of smoothing artifacts, you want to preserve the vertex normal data that was read in during the transfer from MoI.

The only time you should delete vertex normal data is if you have done some edits on the model like pulling around some points. If you end up using the old vertex normals, it will try to shade it with the previous shading information which will no longer match the new model point structure. That's actually something that would be better for the program to just handle automatically for you though (meaning it should just auto delete vertex normals if you pull some points around). Also some programs may sometimes not transform the vertex normals properly if you rotate or flip the normal directions on objects in some cases like if you're in a particular edit mode, that's a bug that should be reported in those programs so that they can improve their vertex normal handling to work better.

Do you have an example model that you can post where you had to delete the normal tag in order for it to render properly? Was it a case where it did not look correct if you just rendered it immediately or did you run into problems after doing some kind of edits or transforms to the object?

If you can post an example of that it would be helpful for me to see it so I can figure out what is going wrong with it, because under regular circumstances you should try to preserve the normal tag and not delete it. Having the accurate vertex normals come through and used in the final render is a key thing to enable the renders to look totally smooth and be shaded exactly the same as the original NURBS objects, because those vertex normals come from the original surface instead of being created just by averaging polygon faces.

- Michael