Hi Mark, Marc Tellier was also recently running into the same problem where none of the mesh programs that he tried (I gave him a list of a bunch of different ones) could merge OBJ files into a single one and also keep all the vertex normals.

He resorted to just using a text editor to merge them - one thing that makes that easier is to turn on the "relative indexing" OBJ export style from MoI, which you can do in moi.ini under:

[OBJ Export]
UseRelativeIndexing=y

That makes the faces index vertices using a negative number which means "back this many from the last seen vertex" - it makes the faces more self contained with the vertices before them rather than faces referencing things by absolute position.

However, be aware that some programs won't read an OBJ file that uses relative index numbers like that, that's why it is not enabled by default.


Probably some of the more heavy hitter programs like Cinema4D, Maya, or Softimage would be able to handle this OBJ merging task for you, but of course those are all fairly expensive.


It would probably not take me very long to write a standalone OBJ file merger utility, I'll see if I can cook something up for that within the next week or so, that may help you for the time being.


> I'm thinking perhaps we could apply a base mesh setting
> to an object and then select areas of any surfaces in that
> object that we want more dense (using say, a lasso) and
> re-mesh those areas.

So unfortunately this part of what you are talking about here would probably require quite an extensive amount of work to make happen. That would be a lot of specialized UI and I can forsee a lot of issues such as strange mesh formations or aliasing where things abruptly switch settings within the same surface.


A "per object" setting would be much more feasible at some point, it would probably need to wait until I had a good place in the UI to put a bunch of extra object properties.


But in the near term I think I can cook up a merging utility for you.

It is strange that so many other programs can't handle it.

- Michael