Thanks for sharing your work Gep, MOI is so effortlessly precise that it really does make complex work of this kind a sinch!
In addition, it must be said that time is not the only important factor - one other is the maintenance of sanity during tough deadlines, when there just isn't enough time to work fully conscious and considerate of ones actions.

Hi Michael,

Ah ok, face normals, sorry i am not very aware of the proper vocabulary (when i worked with real clay, vertices and face normals were always just right, haha).

Yes, double sided material solves the problem, exept that the polys remain impossible to select, making material assignment quite painful in modo... (ok you can do it in MoI, but you still need selection in modo for size or position adjustment, etc...)

Fliping in MoI would be great as far as you know which part to flip, but as you can see in the previous image, it would be a tedious work to do here, except if it does a kind of "align" like in modo, that is turning all normals in the same way for a given surface. And here i wonder why this function has no effect in modo, it works just fine usually.

So you're right, the best way is to have a solid.

As for the creases on n-gons, here is a picture (i turned on reflexion mode in viewport for better visualisation, these creases do show in render) :



As you can see, my fillet definition is quite low, this does not happen when i export with more subdivisions. But i have to do an entire town and need to keep the poly count to the minimum. Of course, this does not happen if i export with separate surfaces. Keeping or deleting the vertex normals does not change anything in this case. (note : i redid the export for example and divided plan surfaces here, but the issue is the same with default value for this setting)

Thanks again for your kind help. (and forgive my english, please)

Ambimind, yes you're right, sanity is the hardest thing to keep in this job, haha...

Hi Gep - sorry I'm not completely familiar with some Modo details - how is it that using double-sided materials does not allow you to select the polygons?

Do you mean you are not seeing the back-facing polygons inside of the Modo editor window? Surely there is some setting within Modo that you can toggle to make those show up and be selectable. You may need to post a question regarding that in the Luxology forum to get some modo-specific advice for that part.

> As for the creases on n-gons, here is a picture (i turned on
> reflexion mode in viewport for better visualisation, these
> creases do show in render) :

Are you 100% certain that you have the vertex normal map being used in that case? Getting the proper vertex normals to be used should avoid shading glitches like that from happening.

Also which format did you use for transferring - you should usually use LWO format to get the best results with going to Modo.

If you still can't get the n-gons to shade properly even if you're really sure you're using the vertex normal map, can you please post a 3DM file with that geometry in it that you are showing there (just only that geometry and not all the rest of the file would be easiest to test with), so I can take a look at it?

Also note that if you want to have a solid but have the pieces for it to be separated on export, there is actually a setting for "Weld vertices along edges" which you can uncheck when exporting solids out from MoI which will make the mesh generated from each surface in a solid have its own separate vertices along shared edges (but with still unified mesh structures) instead of having faces actually share a single vertex in common between them where they touch at a common edge. So if you want to have separate pieces in Modo it's probably best to keep things as solids but turn off welding at export time to get that, sorry I forgot to mention that setting previously.

But I'm kind of confused about that screenshot that you show, because that's exactly the kind of artifacts that you should not be seeing if you get the vertex normals that are exported from MoI to be used for the rendering. That screenshot looks like the kind of thing you would see if you are not using vertex normals from MoI and instead having Modo automatically cook them up by just averaging the normals of adjacent faces - that's what happens if the vertex normal map is not used.

- Michael

> but as you can see in the previous image, it would be a
> tedious work to do here, except if it does a kind of "align"
> like in modo, that is turning all normals in the same way
> for a given surface.

Well yes when you do a Flip in MoI it flips the entire surface including other surfaces that are joined to it all as one piece, then all the polygons generated from that flipped surface will be going in the other direction.

But yes it can be better to use solids rather than messing with flipping but I still don't understand why you can't just turn on double sided lighting and not have to deal with it at all...

Surely there is a setting Modo for you to be able to see double-sided display within the editor window as well.

- Michael

Ok ok, it's all my fault, i now can export with no artefacts on n-gones, i was just doing things the wrong way. Sorry to have make you lose time on this, but at least it made me understand...

For modo, yes i can select the inverted polys in modo, but i have to select them "from behind", wich means turning around and inside the mesh again and again. But anyway this issue was solved by closing the mesh in MoI, so no more need to spent time on this either.

So, many thanks for your help, it all came from me and my poor technical skills, but you had me progressing. :)

Back to work now, buildings, buildings, houses, buildings...

Hi Gep, no problem, I'm glad you've got things working now!

But you may want to ask on the Luxology forum about some setting to make all polygons show up in the editor window instead of having back-facing ones being hidden in the display. There is likely some setting you can switch to make that happen and then you would no longer need to spin around to select those polygons, that would then make things easier.

- Michael

This option will help to solve your selection problem.