I cannot speak to the official road map of Octane Render,as I have no control of that aspect of the Octane Render product, but from personal experience, I can confirm that the situation is not resolved 100% that the smooth group options do not rectify the situation.

I have tremendous respect for Radiance for his vision and skill to bring Octane Render to market. That is one of the reasons that I became involved with the project. I also love rendering in Octane as it allows me to "see" more than I could with other render engines.

I am for the most part, able to export items from MOI and make beautiful renders in Octane. It works great for my purposes. I can export a cylinder created in Moi using the standard tools and it looks perfect in Octane Render.

I tried the cylinder that you provided, Michael, in Modo and Blender using the script you provide. Using the OBJ import script, it is faceted in Blender and smooth in Modo. So, obviously, the code in Blender is not importing it correctly either, even with the modified script. Obviously, Modo was fine as many have stated. I also tried exporting this Cylinder as an LWO and using the MOI with Normals lwo import script listed on the MOI3D Resources web page, and it too creates a faceted cylinder upon import. So, I understand that you created the cylinder to prove a point and we'll try to use it as a test case to get the normals correct when the time is right.

I completely understand that many people may want to jump on SimLab or other comparable render engine if they feel that Octane is not the perfect companion to MOI3D now. It is something that I would like to have researched and improved in Octane, but cannot state that it will in fact be resolved for the 1.0 release.

We will continue to supply demos for users to evaluate prior to purchase, so please feel free to check it out before any purchase is made to ensure that Octane Render meets expectations.

Thanks for your patience with this issue. I will report back as progress is made.

Sincerely:

Phil Beauchamp
Refractive Software