Hey Michael!
Just wanted to tell this issue with the vertex map. And since I'm new to Modo and just testing MoI this was an issue I couldn't solve for a day and was really happy to have found the comments and this tutorial I've mentioned.
So my intention was to export some l beveled objects (lots of facets) to further render in Modo and so I didn't know what was going on at this time.

My suggestion would be to implement a checkbox for switching on and of this v-map-export even to clear things up.

Vertex Maps are exported from MoI and imported by Modo. There is no need for an option.

You are using .LWO as an export format, aren't you? IGES doesn't work as well as LWO.

Hi Anton, could you describe a bit more about what the actual problem is that you were seeing?

Were you trying to edit the object somehow after importing it into Modo?

Vertex normals should not cause any problems if you are just importing your file and rendering it - on the contrary they actually help out significantly in that situation because they make the shading look better.

But if you were doing some kind of other steps than just simply rendering it, then you could possibly need to clear the vertex normals - but that's actually what I would consider a bug in Modo's handling of vertex normals, they should automatically clear the vertex normals and also update them in some situations where they currently do not. Hopefully this will get improved in Modo at some point so that you won't need to do any manual step of clearing normals over there.


> My suggestion would be to implement a checkbox for
> switching on and of this v-map-export even to clear things up.

I'm still not clear on what the problem was...

Under the typical circumstances of just importing a LWO file into Modo and rendering it, there should not be any need to delete the vertex normal map.

- Michael

Ok, this is absolutely cool to have vertex-maps if you are about to render a NURBS-like effect.
In contrast (only my design approach in my test project!) if you are about to render the faceted mesh which you are seeing while exporting the mesh and dragging the polygon slider then I was really annoyed (never dealt with vertex maps so far) that I couldn't get the clue, even when switching off the smooth option in the assigned material, why there wouldn't be any facets at all.
For any non-expert switching over to Modo (and case he also wants faceted geometry rendered in Modo) this would be only an comprehensible option to get a clue what's going on.

Cheers,
A

Hi Anton I see - but that's a pretty unusual circumstance to actually want to render a faceted look to your objects rather than a smooth render.


> For any non-expert switching over to Modo (and case he also
> wants faceted geometry rendered in Modo) this would be only
> an comprehensible option to get a clue what's going on.

I'm not really sure that having a checkbox for disabling vertex normals would actually solve this problem... For example if someone didn't know how vertex normals would affect their rendering it would also be easy for them to not know they had to uncheck that option (and then also adjust the material properties in Modo) in order to get a faceted render look.

I think it's just something that you need to know how to work in Modo - if you have any vertex normal map it should be deleted to get that effect.

That's a good thing to know how to work in Modo because other kinds of file imports into Modo can also create vertex normals, like importing an OBJ file for example. So if you don't learn how Modo works you could easily run into the same problems when importing other kinds of files from other programs as well.


> then I was really annoyed (never dealt with vertex maps so far)
> that I couldn't get the clue, even when switching off the smooth
> option in the assigned material, why there wouldn't be any
> facets at all.

Yes, it seems like that could be some confusing UI in Modo, where it looks like you are disabling smoothing but nothing happens.

Maybe you could report that UI problem to Luxology and see if they can improve the UI so that it won't be so confusing in that particular area. Possibly if you disable smoothing in the material it could stop vertex normals from being used or something like that.

- Michael

> then I was really annoyed (never dealt with vertex maps so far)
> that I couldn't get the clue, even when switching off the smooth
> option in the assigned material, why there wouldn't be any
> facets at all.

Because a vertex map is active, any change of the smoothing angle in the surface editor isn't take into account.
To remove the vertex map :

List / Other maps / Right click on Vertex map and choose delete.