Hi Mike, that's great!

So let me verify for future reference in case others ask me this question -

you need to switch to Quads & Triangles output, and then did you also need to turn off welding when exporting from MoI ?

Then when using the EI converter, turn off shading and angle settings so that it will use the shading information stored in the OBJ file instead of creating its own shading from averaging the polygon data.

Is that correct?


Basically once you have set OBJ output to Quads & Triangles and turn welding off, that puts the exact same information into the OBJ file as what I would write into a FACT file.

Then the question I would have is why does EI make you jump through some extra hoops with a separate converter and with turning off settings for shading, instead of using the good shading from the file by default?

If they would have built-in support for reading OBJ, and also default to using the good shading information ("vertex normals") that are stored in the OBJ file, that would streamline this process and make EI read OBJ files just as easily as it reads FACT files... At least that's what it sounds like to me.

Is there any chance they might tune up these procedures on their end to make EI more friendly to OBJ format? OBJ format is now pretty much the most common format used for data exchange, so it makes things a lot easier for everyone when a program has good support for a commonly used file format like this. It's just a lot easier for me to focus my attention on a smaller number of more commonly used file formats than to try and develop a whole bunch of different specialized formats. File format work just tends to be really pretty finicky and requires quite a lot of testing from my end to make sure that it is working correctly, so each one that I try and tackle is a pretty big investment of time...

- Michael