Hi Mike, usually you would only want to use .3ds format as an absolute last resort - it's a very old format and has a major limitation in that it has no way to store vertex normal shading information along with the mesh. When that shading information is missing, it means the rendering program has to create it by averaging the normals from the polygon faces and that usually leaves some hint of the polygonal structure in the shading. When the renderer is able to use the vertex normals from the original NURBS surfaces which are in the .obj file that makes the shading look exactly the same as the original surface and totally glitch free.

By orientation do you mean your objects are being rotated when imported into Simlab using .obj format?

If so then you should be able to fix that by using the option in MoI to change the orientation used for generating .obj files - it's a setting under Options > Import/Export > "OBJ options" > Orientation . Change the dropdown there from "Y-Up" to "Z-Up" and that should solve that.

- Michael