Hi Keith,

> I assume then that both Carrara and Daz Studio will have problems importing an OBJ file created by
> many modeling programs not just Moi.

Yes, that's correct - basically it will be problematic to import OBJ files created by any CAD program. CAD programs need to have the rendering program use the vertex normals information that is stored in the OBJ file. If the importing application just ignores those normals (which come from the original CAD surfaces), and instead creates new normals just by looking at the polygon data alone it will result in shading artifacts.

If all the polygons are very evenly distributed and of almost the same size that also tends to reduce these kinds of artifacts, and since most sub-d models are constructed in that way sub-d models are generally not as impacted by this problem. That is likely why they did not realize they were messing things up when they changed how they deal with vertex normals in the imported files, because they probably only tested it with sub-d models and not any CAD generated models.

If you can find the "Surfaces pane" in Carrara that may be where you can find the control to turn off break-angle normal generation and possibly restore the original normals as described in that Carrara discussion thread.

- Michael