Hi tijai - it's a change that Luxology has made in Modo 601.

They switched the orientation that they read normals in from LWO files - they now read in normals using the same orientation as LightWave v10.

So that means that LWO files with vertex normals in them that imported fine into Modo 501 and earlier will not work properly with Modo 601 anymore - I would recommend contacting them and asking why they made this change and if they have any settings that can be adjusted to go back to Modo 501 behavior.

If you are using MoI v3 there is an option to export LW10 style vertex normals that you can set under Options > Import/Export > LWO options > "Vertex normals style" - set that to "Vertex normals style: LightWave v10" and then the LWO file that is generated out from MoI should go into Modo 601 properly.

If you have a bunch of existing LWO files already saved out, then as you already found out that if you import them into Modo 501 and then save out as an LXO file you can then open that LXO file in Modo 601 and it will be ok, because they did not change how the normals work for LXO files, only for LWO files.

But that may be annoying to do that if you have a lot of files - hopefully they will implement something like a setting so that you could go back to the previous LWO import behavior in Modo since that's really quite awkward for a program to suddenly change how it interprets vertex normals without having some way to stay compatible with previous files.

Anyway, I do suggest that you contact Luxology and also ask them why it suddenly behaves differently in Modo 601, maybe if they get enough questions about it they will make a setting for it that you can adjust in Modo.

- Michael