Hi project6, that weird "capped hole" result that you show is due to the Max OBJ importer not being able to produce a correct triangulation of those n-gons.

You could submit it to Autodesk as a bug report and hope that they fix up their OBJ importer, but they have not seemed to put any effort in that area for many years now.

But they do put effort into the FBX import, so that is why I added FBX export to MoI v2. If you use FBX format to go into Max, you should get much better results.

Just make sure to get an updated FBX import plugin for Max, which you can download from here:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/item?siteID=123112&id=10775855

The FBX importer can handle complex n-gons much better than the OBJ importer - it would be nice of course if they could use the same code for both instead of having a bad quality one for the OBJ importer. I don't really know why they do that, you would have to ask Autodesk about that.

Also the OBJ importer does not always seem to be able to import vertex normals. Getting vertex normals imported helps to get a much smoother shading. Vertex normals seem to go through FBX format fine though.


re: Mesh smooth - you should not generally be applying mesh smooth to output from MoI - mesh smooth is something that requires a subdivision friendly topology, most of the time you need to have carefully set up the mesh topology to be prepared for doing that. If you do want to do it, you would probably want to use some re-topologizing tools to produce a more subdivision friendly mesh topology.

But why are you doing mesh smooth at all, is it to try and get a better quality shading?

If you use FBX format where the vertex normals come through ok, you should get a much better quality shaded result directly from the import without any extra steps.

- Michael