Hi Warren,

> Thanks, yes, I'm discovering that I can indeed just use the mesh as-is in
> Modo if I treat it as a static unit.

Yeah it will render very smoothly without applying further sub-d smoothing onto it just as long as you make sure the exported vertex normals are being used.

When MoI exports a mesh, it generates not only polygons but also vertex normals at every vertex to be used for controlling the shading in the rendering, and those vertex normals come from the original NURBS surface and so they make the rendering shade just like the original spline surface. That's why the rendering will turn out nice without needing to do any further geometry smoothing like you're used to doing with sub-d modeling.

It is important though to avoid anything that would disrupt the vertex normals - like for instance don't delete the vertex normals map and I think you need to make sure that you're in "item" mode when you apply any transformations to the imported objects.

Also for going into Modo I'd recommend using LWO format for the transfer.

But basically having the accurate vertex normals that come from the original spline model is what makes things work well - if you were to just generate the same polygons in Modo (without sub-d smoothing, just generating simple polygons), it would not look as good because the vertex normals used to shade those polygons would be coming only by averaging the neighboring polygons instead of coming from some precise ideal surface. Like for example when you export a sphere out from MoI the vertex normals used to shade the polygons are the normals of an exact sphere surface rather than just a local polygon average. The polygon averaged ones are not so bad in that particular case of a sphere but things get worse for the averaged ones in areas where the model shape is in transition from a flat planar face to a neighboring rounded piece for example.

- Michael