Hi Mike, an image would be good.

From what I can tell from your description, it sounds like EI is not making use of the vertex normal shading information that is present in the OBJ file.

When that shading information is not used, shading will be calculated by just averaging the normals of nearby polygons which is not as accurate as using the vertex normals in the file which come from the original NURBS surface.

When I looked through the FACT file format stuff, it seemed like it had some entries in it for having vertex normals, so I would assume that EI supports vertex normals in its regular operation. I'm not sure why they wouldn't read them in from the OBJ file though...

Actually, I have one idea... One additional thing to try - when you export the OBJ file, expand the little arrow in the lower-left corner of the mesh dialog and un-check "Weld vertices along edges".

EI may be getting confused because they might not support faces that share the same 3D vertices between one another but have unique UV and vertex normals. By turning welding off it prevents this kind of partial sharing between faces, that may work better.


Hmmm.. yeah looking through the FACT docs again, it appears that the vertex normals that EI uses are only specified per-vertex, they aren't specified per-face. So turning welding off should probably help.

- Michael