Hi Michael ...

No, I am not doing any modifying in SimLab.

I did not see the .mtl files and will look again but I think I see a simple solution:

If I keep all of a material type in a style and then before exporting turn off all the other styles I can then select everything on that layer and assign it the same object name. Or so it seems from a quick experiment.

I think that SimLab will then assign a single material to that 'object' even if there are many iterations of that. I have not tried this but will soon.

Until now I have been opening my drawings in Rhino and then rendering with Flamingo which assigns materials by 'layer' (which more or less corresponds to MoI 'styles')

I have been looking for a simple way to reduce the number of programs I have to use to get results ... The MoI/SimLab combo looks like it makes for a reasonably simple and inexpensive solution.

At the moment my brain and my computer are both swollen with too many options. :)

cheers,
eric