Hi!

As I am exploring a possible workflow to integrate MoI it gets more and more apparent that as soon as I manipulate the UV map I loose my vertex normals on exporting, which means I can either have a nice UV layout OR good shading, but not both.

Which applications or workflow can you recommend to achieve this? It would be best to find some small tool to just unwrap the geometry while preserving the normals, but right now I am looking for anything that can provide me with an obj with both the changed uv's and the vertex normals.

As the obj format is not that complex, another idea I had was to just copy the changed vt's (texture coordinates) to the orginal obj file or copy the original vn's (vertex normals) to the unwrapped obj file. But that didn't turn out well as the whole file seems to have been changed in between and they were out of sync. Is this feasible? All it would take is a small script, providing the vertex order, coordintes etc. stay the same.

Right now I am using Blender which I can get the normals to read using the build on this forum but on export they are lost again. My main render engine is Thea which reads obj's with vertex normals, no problem.

This seems so simple yet poses such a huge problem for me!