Hi NightCabbage,

> Providing these small problems can be fixed, which would, in
> general, be better to use - lwo or obj importer?

The main difference is that the OBJ importer does try to import materials as well, the lwo one imports geometry only.

But also the OBJ importer seems to have bugs in its material handling as well though.

For now you'll probably need to stick with Blender 2.49 instead of version 2.5 in order to run these particular scripts.

- Michael

Hi NightCabbage,

Michael's modified blender obj script works perfectly to import Moi obj's with the vertex normals intact. Unfortunately, I found that the script had an inconsistent bug which seemed to shift the material assignments by 1. eg. if materials were red, green & blue then the blender importer would make green = red and blue = green. My recollection is that the red colour would switch to a grey default.

I checked the script with my limited skills. There seems to be an indexing issue. I thought I had it zapped a couple of times but it was never consistent. I doubt it is a difficult fix but I didn't have time to mess around with it.

What is your reason for needing to import the model as obj into blender with material colours assigned? Do you need to UV map in blender or perhaps you have my problem of needing to merge obj "parts" into one obj? If it is the latter then Michael has kindly solved that problem for us with a little app you can download via the wiki. Needless to say, it does the job perfectly.

Mark

No, thankfully I don't need the materials intact at all - so this shouldn't be a problem for me.

What I'm attempting to do is to import either a .obj or .lwo file into Blender 2.5 with the normals intact - and this is proving difficult :)

From what I can see, Anthony has created the following:

- Patch for Blender 2.4 to preserve normals
- Import script for Blender 2.4 to import normals

- Patch for Blender 2.5 to preserve normals
- But no import script for Blender 2.5 to import normals - which is my problem :(

Hi NightCabbage,

Do you still have 2.4x installed? Couldn't you just use the 2.4 modified obj or lwo importer, save it out as a .blend and then open in 2.5?

Cheers for the reply Mark - not a bad idea - however, luckily for me, the author (Anthony) has released a new 2.5 version with an .lwo import script included - yays! :D

Excellent news and thanks for the heads up.

Does the new one import materials?

In my opinion Blender 2.5 is a big step forward.

Yes, I agree about Blender 2.5 :)

I don't think it does import materials?
(does .lwo support that?)

> (does .lwo support that?)

.lwo does support materials, and MoI does export them into the .lwo file (with style assignments in MoI becoming material assignments in the .lwo file) but I don't think that script tries to read them in.

- Michael

Thanks Michael :)

Hi,
I am having trouble importing smooth models into blender from MoI 3d. I tried using the script at the top of this thread and couldn't get it to pop up on the import tab. I am currently running blender 2.76

any help is much appreciated

thanks

Hi MTp - for a long time it's been a problem with Blender that it didn't import vertex normals. But I think I heard that has recently been improved - here's a Blender discussion thread on it:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?299193-Modified-OBJ-Importer-for-Custom-Vertex-Normals

Try using OBJ format and see if that works better than FBX, and if you still don't see smooth shading maybe try installing the updated importer from that Blender forum link above.

- Michael

Hi MTp ok so according to that Blender forum discussion thread above the regular OBJ importer in the newest Blender release is supposed to import vertex normals now. It might not be supported for other formats like LWO or FBX yet, so try using OBJ format and hopefully that will bring across the proper shading information.

- Michael