Hi Phil, that's nice to have some progress there!

But really smoothgroups is not the best solution - the best solution is to not try and do any kind of additional smoothing calculations or break angles or anything like that at all, and just use the vertex normals as provided in the OBJ file.

You're still going to see various artifacts if the accurate vertex normals are not used for shading, for example in your "with smooth groups" post above, there are some irregularities visible in this area here:




That is supposed to be a perfectly smooth sphere, and the vertex normals that are in the OBJ file come from that sphere.

But if you try to recreate the vertex normals from the polygon data alone, _even with a smoothing groups mechanism enabled_ (!!!) you won't get as good of a result as just using the normals that are stored in the file.

I don't really know how I could explain it in any better ways than above in this thread, did you see my prior simplified explanation about why smoothing groups should not have anything to do with rendering the output from MoI? That was here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3386.16


What about the cylinder case as posted above, does the new Octane smoothing groups mechanism solve that problem?


- Michael