Hi Chris,

> Only care when they overlap a bunch in a model :( Means I
> have to get in there and poly edit them.

If you run into triangulation problems where the internal triangulation of the n-gon has overlapping triangles where some are starting to go in the wrong orientation, then that's a bug in the n-gon triangulation mechanism of the FBX importer.

That's in Autodesk code - there isn't anything I can do myself to fix up that particular problem, you will need to send a bug report in to them to get them to improve the triangulation algorithm so that it doesn't make bad triangles like that. Doing a really robust triangulator is a fairly tricky thing so problems similar to that are not too uncommon - it may help them if you can send them an example of the n-gon that does not triangulate properly so they can have a case to test with.

If that does not happen very frequently though, you can probably export from MoI using n-gons most of the time, and only export from MoI using "Output: Quads & Triangles" for cases where the FBX n-gon triangulation mechanism had some difficulty.

- Michael

What Michael says is right. The internal hidden triangulation is not a concern unless it causes artefacts. Don't forget that quads are internally triangulated as well. Non-planar polys can cause an issue but only for the Phong calculator. If the vertex normals are imported, then there should be no issue.

By the way you must turn off the Smoothing Groups option in the Geometry roll out. If this is turned on, the importer will discard vertex normals and calculate smoothing groups instead.

Here's another screen shot from Max 2012. This is the same model from MoI. I have added an edit Normal modifier so you can see the normals. This is showing the vertex normals of one of the filleted edges and they have been imported perfectly.

Sharp edges (not shown here) have 2 vertex normals, as they should.

Incidentally, the Max importer does import vertex normals but if the same fbx file is imported in to Modo, the Modo fbx importer discards the vertex normals. The problem there is with Luxology's implementation of the fbx importer. For Modo, LWO files import correctly with vertex normal data.