Hi sneather, sorry but now I'm more confused about what you've got than before.


> Say the CAD designer creates a bolt and a nut. But they wind up "joining"
> the two separate objects into one object, when they export the .step file.

What do you mean by "joining" exactly - just exporting 2 objects into one file does not "join" them in the sense that they become one single object that's all physically connected together like it would happen when you boolean the 2 objects together into one single object.


> So, in MOI, I can normally jut hover over either the nut, or the bolt, and
> the program will recognize that it is a separate object.

Right, if you have this it means that you have separate objects and not just one single object.

But you wrote above that you don't have this, you said you only had one single object. So I don't understand what you have right now - do you have more than one object or just one single big object that's all physically connected together as one single piece?


> I can then select it, type in a new name, and presto! it's now got its own layer

MoI does not actually use that specific name "Layer" so that's making it a bit difficult to 100% accurately decode what you are asking about - are you talking about giving each object its own "Style" in MoI or it's own "Object name" in MoI ?

If you want each separate object to have its own individual style (which will then translate to individual materials in the OBJ file), you can do that by first using the script from above to get each object to have it's own separate name, and then after that use the script from here which creates a separate style for each named object:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3334.2

- Michael