Hi okapi, I'm mostly focused first on getting the UI nailed down, but I can give you at least the general ideas so far on how I think file transfer is going to be handled.


> - will the group be recognized as separate layers by Rhino?

Right now the way that I'm thinking of doing it is that "Styles" in MoI will map to layers in Rhino.

I want groups in MoI to be more flexible than layers - for example in MoI you'll be able to have one object belong to multiple different groups. It is not possible in Rhino to have a single object belong to more than one layer at the same time, so that kind of makes it a bad match up between MoI groups and Rhino layers.

However, styles in MoI are assigned as one style per object, this seems to make them a better thing to match up as layers.

Also you'll use styles in MoI to control the visual appearance of your object, and often in Rhino layers are used to control the visual appearance of your object as well, so again that is a good correlation.

So I think that if you want the organization to come across you'll want to use Styles in MoI to organize your objects and control visibility using the Styles section of the scene browser rather than the Groups section.



> - will the layers from a Rhino file be recognized as separate groups?

I'm thinking that probably layers from a Rhino file could open as Styles inside of MoI, to match up with the export mechanism as described above.


> -will it be possible to export OBJ models that preserve the grouping mode.

OBJ files have a few different methods that can be used to tag different parts of the model data.

I'm thinking that groups in MoI can translate into groups in the OBJ file (which at least in the file spec allows for one object to belong to multiple groups) and I think that Styles will go out as material assignments.

- Michael