Hi Burr, just a quick note on Hypershot - it tends to kind of glom objects together which can make it hard to assign separate materials to different objects.

If you run the SeparateOBJ utility on your .obj file saved from MoI (yes, use Quads & Triangles since it doesn't like n-gons all that well), then that arranges it with different material assignments per object and then Hypershot should recognize objects as different individual entities that can be assigned different materials.

The SeparateOBJ utility is here:
http://moi3d.com/wiki/Resources#SeparateOBJ_editor

And yup, it is a goal in v2 to improve this by being able to assign styles, which will then go out as material assignments in the .obj file which HyperShot should recognize.

- Michael

Hi Michael,
Thanks for that Info. I am finding stuff out but it is a bit greek to me. Because it wouldnt open my 3dm files at all, and said it does, and after reading up a bit on "Materials", On a hunch I opened Rhino...Poof, Hypershot as a plug-in. Imagine that. Not knowing Rhino all that well I poked around on the object properties and found material, and the option to assign hypershot material. Though much more limited, I chose some materials and saved and opened model in Hypershot and Presto. Assignable pieces. So I understand enough to continue and you may have to set it clear for me one more time.

The 3dm import was much more desirable for me than trying to obj export, though I did hear you just tell me that "seperateOBJ" would also solve my problem (I always forget about that) I liked what I saw come out of Rhino (my MoI model just saved by it).

I just thought, "Oh well, looks like I'll be buying rhino to export with if I want Hypershot"....But I thought I just heard you say that MoI's new Styles will do this same things for my 3dm files by assigning some kind of "Material attribute" that Hypershot is looking for??? And I will be dancing around my little statue again?

Thanks,
Burr

Hi Burr,

> But I thought I just heard you say that MoI's new Styles
> will do this same things for my 3dm files by assigning
> some kind of "Material attribute" that Hypershot is
> looking for???

Yup, that's what the goal is - that Styles in MoI will become material assignments in an .obj file that you write out.

I'm not quite sure what the deal will be with trying to read in 3DM directly into Hypershot though... For that route I think that the styles will translate as layers and I think that will also let Hypershot see them but I'm not quite as sure about that part.

The problem with exporting as 3DM into Hypershot is that then you're relying on Hypershot's mesher to convert NURBS data into meshes. That works pretty much ok for a lot of things, but if you run into problems on more complex models you'll probably want to export as .obj out from MoI because then you'll be using MoI's mesher to convert from NURBS into polygons.

- Michael

OIC. I suppose I'll have to learn the subtlties of exporting polydata. When I was in Rhino and looked at object material properties, "Layers" were the default selected.

Anyway, It looks promissing....I'm struggling a bit with the viewport commands but it might be that i have my middle mouse button doing something other than a click.

Anyway, thanks for the input. If it must be meshed then I stand by your mesher for sure. No mush. Only mesh.

Hey a slogan:

MoI's Mesh no Mush. If want mush, MoI's Mesh no want. If like mesh, no like mush, rush to MoI's mesh.

Ok, Good night. :O (I think I've Hypershot my brain)

Hi Burr, well any way that works is fine! :)

For a whole lot of cases you should be fine exporting 3DM and using HyperShot's mesher. Or I guess if you are using the Rhino plugin it may be using Rhino's mesher.

If you happen to find something that does not work well with that method, then just keep in mind that you can export to .obj from MoI which will then use MoI's mesher instead.

- Michael

Sorry Burr, I have to laugh :D, because I was going through the exact same dilemma that you're going through with HS.

When this happened to me I went through and tested each option, and the same thing happened if I imported a .3dm directly, as Michael mentioned, for simple single objects there was no problem, when it got to the complex stuff like the camera and Robby it failed miserably, so I exported .obj from MoI, opened in HS and as mentioned it 'glom's' :) objects together.
OK lets try the SeparateOBJ utility, yep it works but separates every surface, so if you have 999 surfaces, you have to apply a material to every one, one click at a time.

So I decided to go through Carrara and apply colours to each object and group them in there, and that workflow seemed to work, that's how I did the camera.
As for Robby, I tried another method, I looked at HS import options and saw .stp, if you have an assembly of parts then step will recognise and I think assign a tag to each part, Michael can elaborate on the workings of step 'cause I don't know exactly what it does, opened it up in HS and hey presto! all separate 'solid' pieces/objects, the way I modelled it in MoI.

So I guess HS .stp to .obj mesher, not masher, :) handles things better.
Anyhow to cut a long story short, Save/Export from MoI as a step file and open that in HS and start assigning your materials, it's that easy.

Cheers

Thanks for that insight Danny! I was at the "SeperateOBJ" file utility and trying to assign materials to all the "seperate surfaces" as you mentioned. I was wondering how that was going to work out. I dont think I would have tried Step, but will now!

Thanks again,
Burr

Hi Danny,

> Michael can elaborate on the workings of step 'cause
> I don't know exactly what it does,

It's probably just some kind of side effect from how they happen to import STEP, for whatever reason that ends up with one layer per object in the STEP file.

It would be good if they could make for some more flexibility in how they import stuff, like for 3DM I think they don't look at individual "objects" and instead just group everything by layers only.

At any rate, I think that Styles in MoI will be the key thing to make this easier.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

> At any rate, I think that Styles in MoI will be the key thing to make this easier.

Yeah, we're waiting for it, so stop chatting and get back to work :)

Cheers

Hi Michael,

>>Yup, that's what the goal is - that Styles in MoI will become material assignments in an .obj file that you write out.

Will this work for .LWO format too?

Suggestion,To Include Collada file support, many programs and game engine's use it. LightWave CORE will also use Collada as it's main file format instead of LWO and LWS. http://www.newtek.com/core/techfaq.php
Modo 401 is having un official implementation of Collada import and export. (is also gonna be part of the SDK).

Awesome Danny!

I think it was movies like those from the 50's and 60's SciFi (as well as cartoons) That pushed me into design field in the first place.

Your model(s) and renderings are an inspiration! (Moment of Inspiration)

Michael T.

Hi Yannada,

> Suggestion,To Include Collada file support, many
> programs and game engine's use it.

I'd like to work on including it in the future at some point, but maybe it would help if I knew of a specific problem that it would solve for you.

I would just be writing the exact same data out that is already being written to .obj, .lwo, or .fbx format, all of which support shading normals and n-gons.

Is there a particular program that you are using that only works well with Collada format and does not handle any of these other formats?

I would think that the new LightWave would also be pretty focused on doing a strong support of .lwo since it will be necessary for supporting data created in previous versions of LightWave.

- Michael

Is all good here it was just a thought since there is a shift towards .fbx and .dae perhaps will be easier or less work for you if were to just support these. I think with .fbx .dae and .skp you are covered for every software out there, so you can forget .lwo .obj .3ds. Anyway I am not a specialist on data formats so I may be wrong, it just seems to me that Autodesk is pushing .fbx and collada is...

>> so you can forget .lwo .obj .

Please don't do that - I use these formats.

Plus I don't own, and am unlikely to own, any Autodesk products.

Same here ash ten years later I'm Autodesk free but I still have partner they do use Autodesk software .fbx exchange is good for that purpose. And Collada can cover the rest software out there, as I mention earlier Newtek is changing so collada it may be the easy way to go in the future, also for Modo users.

Hi Yannada, well adding a new format will involve more work, not less.

In general .obj seems to be the most widely supported format out there, so it is not practical to remove support for that.

For example if I removed both .obj and .3ds format, then I think export to ZBrush would not be possible, since it supports .obj and .3ds but not .fbx or .dae if I remember right.

Even with the new Lightwave having .dae as its default, it would be good to know if there was actually some advantage to using it instead of .lwo - like is their .lwo support buggy? (hard to imagine since they need to support a ton of old .lwo files) Or is there some kind of special function that is only available in .dae and not in .lwo ? (Something that applies to MoI I mean, for example animation type data doesn't really apply to MoI's exports since MoI is focused only on modeling and not on animation tools).

It is hard to make it a priority unless there is an actual practical advantage to be had for it.

- Michael

Hi Tony,

> Will this work for .LWO format too?

Yup, that is the idea as well...

The way that LWO is structured does not quite exactly line up as easily as .obj though.

In LWO polygons can be marked to have a "surface" assignment - a surface is a render material. So I was thinking that probably styles would map to that.

Then there is also something called a "layer" which is a grouping of polygons. It's kind of like a cross between an "object" and a "group" sort of... I think that possibly groups or named objects could be translated as different LWO layers.

It's a little tricky because there isn't quite the concept of a single "object" in the file structure, the closest thing to that is a layer I think. This is a little different than what a "layer" is in a CAD program.

- Michael

Damn those renders are HOTT - EXCELLENT WORK!

-Will

>> Yup, that is the idea as well...

Great.

Mapping groups and stuff sounds cool too. I wonder how modo will handle it (I don't actually have Lightwave so only interested in this as a means of getting data from MoI to modo).

modo has a concept of polygon tags. Select a bunch of poly and assign a tag to them. This can then be used to map materials to specific polys. This looks like how the 'surface' assignment is translated. Makes sense to have style mapped to this.

modo then has mesh items which look like they matche with the 'layer' concept. At the moment each object in MoI comes over as a new mesh item called obj1, obj2, etc. A mesh item is just a group of polys, connected or unconnected. Polys can be cut and pasted between mesh items and the mesh items can be turned on/off, grouped or instanced. They are displayed like layers in the item list, along with other objects.


So I think you are right that the layer is the closest thing to a single object. Proof is in the eating of course :-)