Ok, finally got to the bottom of this lwo normals issue.

Regularly a LWO file has x,y,z coordinates specified in a left-handed coordinate system.

Just to make things interesting I guess, Modo decided to have vertex normal coordinates specified in a right-handed coordinate system instead.

Now that I've got that set up, things are working great with Modo 203 - accurate vertex normals are coming through and that makes for noticeably smoother shading. Shading artifacts are basically eliminated.

I need to check out a few other things, later today I should be able to make another new beta with this fix in it.


One additional note - if you want to edit the LWO mesh in Modo by yanking some points around, etc, you'll probably need to find some way to strip out the vertex normals. They're stored with labels like "vert_normals1", "vert_normals2", somewhere in the Modo UI these should show up. Modo does not seem to update these normals automatically when you move the geometry around, so the shading stays kind of locked in to its initial look despite how you drag points around. This is probably something that should be fixed in Modo to be handled more automatically.

- Michael