Hi Leonard, yeah it can work fine to deform OBJ output from MoI as long as you prepare the output for it by dicing it up into small evenly sized polygons. That's done by using the "Divide larger than" option at mesh export time.

Here's an example PaQ posted some time ago with an object exported from MoI and deformed in Modo:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2704.17


When you enter in a distance for "Divide larger than", it will cause any polygons larger than that size to get split up into smaller pieces.

Once there are numerous vertices distributed more evenly throughout the structure it will be able to be deformed properly in a polygon modeler. That's because a polygon modeler usually deforms objects only by moving their existing vertices around and if your vertices are more sparsely distributed across the model it will not deform well. By default MoI produces that kind of sparser vertex structure because it reduces data size for regular (non-deforming) rendering.

I'm not entirely sure if the true vertex normals will be used after the deform or not - if you are deforming the entire object instead of some portion of it, it is possible that the normals could get deformed as well and remain intact but it is somewhat more likely that they will be discarded and recalculated by an averaging of adjacent faces. But if you have small diced up polygons it can help to reduce shading errors that tend to come from that averaging process as well.

Check out some of these previous posts to see some illustrations of how you want the output to look when you use "Divide larger than" :

http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2833.5
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1084.2
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1549.4
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=804.26

- Michael