Hi J.O. appart from the great modelling, those chair designs are definitely 21st Century, not to mention the website which is brilliant. Like to set up something like that for myself!

Impressive model and renders. I'm also a modo user and was wondering what method you used to get this model into modo. Do you use ngons or just quads and triangles?

Also did you do all of the edge bevels in MOI or some in MODO? I've been messing around with some models in MOI with mixed results when brought into modo to render (odd shading errors).

Did you use the vertex map that comes in from moi or did you delete it and let modo handle it?

Thanks for your help! Keep up the good work.

Hi rado.

I try to use ngons when exporting the LWO. MoI export really nice, clean and "small" meshes.

It depends on the model and how dense I export, but usually I delete the vertex and UV maps. Some model I get is big and messy so it looks really bad with the vertex maps.
I do clean up the model so it looks nice with a smoothing angle of 10-20% in modo. The Merge tool and Merge in modo is great to "fix" the model.

See images below. This model was modeled in MoI and exported as LWO and rendered in modo, with and without (first image) vertex map. As you can see, keeping the vertex map usually is a good idea. :)

Hope that helps. Feel free to ask more questions. :)
-J.O.

Well it's a bit a pitty to remove or lost the vertex map in modo, this is a really important data to have clean render without surface smoothing glitches.
There are many solution to export your model, using .lwo or .obj. ... but there are some rules to keep the vertex map clean.

- Do not copy/merge object in a new layer inside modo, or you will lost the vertex normal info
- Do not modify the geometry inside modo for the same reason.
- I was able to do some mirror, seems to keep the normal info ok, if the mirror result is in the same layer.

When exporting in .lwo, you can use ngone without problems (at least I didn't had any problems so far), however, if the object is complex, you can have thousands of little objects (layers) inside modo, and it's not very handy to manage. And as you can't merge them inside a new layer without loosing the vertex info, it might quickly be a problem.
(Every little object has his own vertex map info)

In .obj, you can use the MergeOBJ editor tool that Michael creates, it will merge every little piece in on single object/surface ... and that's really cool.
However, .obj in ngone comes with some troubles (flipped surfaces), but a little Polygon > Align in Modo will solve the problem

Using Quad/Tris is a good solution to avoid any flipped poly problems, but the mesh is a little bit messy and no easy to uv unwarp for example (there are a lot of micro triangles that are not handy to select).

I'm quite please so far by exporting in .obj + MergeOBJ + Polygon > Align in modo ... but you still have to check the geometry closely to be 100% sure that every normals are in the right direction.

Excellent info PaQ. Thanks for sharing. :)

J.O Rust:

Thanks for your help. Yeah, I've found that keeping the vertex map seems to (for the most part) keep the renders A LOT cleaner in modo. I will try using NGONs and see how this impacts my results.

What I've been doing is taking the output from MOI (LWO format) and merging the layers as I see fit in modo. Then I would take each layer and run the merge vertex command.

PAQ:

"Do not copy/merge object in a new layer inside modo, or you will lost the vertex normal info"

This is really useful info. I've been taking the different layers that MoI creates and merging them into layers that make sense based on the project that I'm working on.

"Do not modify the geometry inside modo for the same reason."

This is also a really good tip.
-Is there any way to bring stuff in from MOI that would allow you to edit things in modo without having the shading problems? I find that a lot of times I'm not very happy with the bevels that are done in MOI. As a result, I've been edge beveling some of my objects in modo.

"if the object is complex, you can have thousands of little objects (layers) inside modo, and it's not very handy to manage. And as you can't merge them inside a new layer without loosing the vertex info"

This is one of the big problems that I've had with MoI to Modo. I did an archviz test, modeling an entire small building in MoI, but when I brought it into Modo there were 500+ mesh items. I merged them all in modo using seneca's meshcleanup and merge scripts. I think that's where I got the crazy shading errors.

"In .obj, you can use the MergeOBJ editor tool that Michael creates, it will merge every little piece in on single object/surface"

This seems like the best solution for what I am trying to accomplish. Will running MergeOBJ maintain all of the MoI vertex map info?


I guess I have one more general question... most of my modeling is archviz related, however, I enjoy occasionally messing around with stuff that is more organic in nature. Is it a good idea to build a model in MoI and then bring it into modo to turn into an SDS object? Or is using subdivision surfaces on an imported object going to completely mess with the vertex maps?


Thanks for your help, the both of you. A lot of these little tidbits of info are things that I had no idea about. I've been working mainly in Modo for the past year now and hadn't even had to think about the complications that arise when bringing things from one 3d app to another.

Knowing now that merging items in modo messes with the vertex maps, I think that the best course of action would be to export items in chunks from MoI, allowing me to get different mesh items in different layers in modo while still preserving the vertex map info. Hopefully this will be a lot easier to do once Michael adds layers to MoI.

Again, thanks for the help!!!!

rado

>> This seems like the best solution for what I am trying to accomplish. Will running MergeOBJ maintain all of the MoI vertex map info?

Yes it will, that's the main purpose of it ... and you can split the object into different layers in modo after the merge without problems.


>> I guess I have one more general question... most of my modeling is archviz related, however, I enjoy occasionally messing around with stuff that is more organic in nature. Is it a good idea to build a model in MoI and then bring it into modo to turn into an SDS object? Or is using subdivision surfaces on an imported object going to completely mess with the vertex maps?

Yes it will lost (or wrong), but it's not really a problem because if you apply the sds algo on a MoI object, it will be a mess in the topology anyway. So you will have to clean it 'by hand'. Generally when working in sds you keep an overall shading smooth angle around 89.9 ... if you need a sharp angle you can either slice the edge loop to increase sds tension, use edge weight or even just split the geometry.

Maybe we can ask seneca to see if he can do something in his merge layers script to keep this info alive.

Thanks again, very useful info. I was doing some basic stuff quite wrong when trying to go from one 3d app to another.