Hello everyone!
I am silently following the progress of MoI development and the amaising stuff you created including rendered models.
I am using Blender for modeling and rendering but find hard to import OBJ files from MoI, which stops me from using the latter.
First I cannot understand OBJ export settings completely and how to optimize the model.
Second when I import that obj file into Blender - when not smoothed - it looks great. However when I smooth the object, everything becomes messy (like the model has overlapping polygons with different direction of the normals. Also I have to correct the mesh point by point because different parts are not joined (although I apply Join operation in MoI).
I am sorry for not supporting my description of the problem with images but don't have at the moment.
I will be gratefull for any explanation! Thanks!

Out of topic:
MoI is very intuitive and easy to learn which is great advantage as modeling tool. Do you have any plans for internal renderer or integration with free raytracers (I mean exporting scenes, lights, materials) ?

Try selecting all the verts and pressing Ctrl N and recalculate normals.

Off topic:

I agree it would be nice to have some sort of light and camera setup for export to render engines.

<First I cannot understand OBJ export settings completely and how to optimize the model.

Maybe you can read the new doc :)
http://moi3d.com/beta/moi_command_reference2.zip
all is clear and explained with simplicity :)

Try with different polygon count at export.

For better results in blender use EdgeSplit modifier.
You can also use subsurfing.

Blender is supposed to develop better nurbs support in the future (through nurbana project) and possibly import .3dm files directly...

-Marc

Thank you for replies! Recalculating normals do not help much. PILOU i tought that the command reference is for programmers :) I definately ill read it now. Edge Split modifier - will try it. And yes direct 3dm import will be great! (OperaMini used sorry)

< i tought that the command reference is for programmers
sorry I should be more explicit :)

Hi Syziph, yes that command reference will probably help, look for the section labeled "Meshing options".

From your description, it sounds like vertices are not welded. That means that some polygons have their own individual vertices where they are matching up along an edge, instead of the polygons being hooked into the same shared vertices there.

Being unwelded means that the polygons are not really "connected" to one another, so some operations that deal with connections between polygons like smoothing will behave differently.

When you export from MoI, expand the Meshing options dialog by the little arrow in the lower-left corner and make sure the "Weld vertices along edges" is checked.

However, it is also possible that Blender's importer automatically separates (unwelds) vertices because of limitations in how it handles vertex normal information. The OBJ file can have different UV texture and normal information at each point of a face - I think that Blender does not support this kind of per-face information and needs to have things like UVs specified per vertex instead. This means that it will break things into separate vertices so that it can assign different values to the different vertices, basically unwelding things. Sorry that is difficult to explain easily but basically to sum it up the Blender importer may separate points itself.

To fix it, there is probably some kind of "merge vertices" or "weld" or "combine points" type command in Blender, you could use that to weld the points together to get the kind of smoothing that you want.

It may also be possible to disable importing UVs or vertex normals on import - that would probably stop the importer from separating the points.


> Do you have any plans for internal renderer or integration with free
> raytracers (I mean exporting scenes, lights, materials) ?

Yes, I definitely want to add some basic rendering features built in to a future version, including being able to assign and export materials.

I'm not completely sure when this will come though, probably there will still be some more modeling functionality that I will focus on for a while first.

- Michael

Hi, I also remember a trouble with 3ds import (and possibly obj. import) in a recent version.
Having Python installed solved the problem.

Hope that will help you,

-Marc

Hi,

yes sometimes it is hard to get an object into Blender and it get's even harder if you want export it to Indigo and much more harder if it is an transparent object (like a glass). :)

I'm still figurung out how to get an object from MoI into Blender without too much tweaking in Blender.

MfG
sk2k

Sorry for the late reply!
Thanks for the tips, Mr. Gibsion!
Thanks to all for the suggestions! I have Python 2.5 installed
Maybe it's a good idea to make things more visual:)
I will try to export something later this day and will post all trouble areas that arise!

Syziph,

If you're having trouble with Blender's OBJ importer, please try the one I wrote. It uses the LWO format and imports normals as well. It might work better for you. The link is in this thread: http://www.moi3d.com/forum/messages.php?webtag=MOI&msg=979.1

Anthony - I did a preliminary search with "Blender" keyword before starting this thread but didn't found your post.
Now I have the opportunity to thank you for this wonderfull import script.
It seems that rendering works perfectly now.
Blender + Moi can work together!
Thank you very much!

Hi,

this could be helpful: http://feeblemind.tuxfamily.org/dotclear/index.php/2007/08/13/88-how-to-solve-blenders-smoothing-problems


MfG
sk2k

Thanks sk2k, I am already familiar with this tutorial.
Here is a test render (look the attachment).
The model was made in MoI, exported as OBJ (with Weld vrtices turned off and level of detail 9, quads and n-gons). I also tried to export it as LWO and import with anthony's import script. The end results in both cases look nearly the same.

The render looks good but in some places you could notice distinct polygons. This could be reduced with increasing the polycount, but that makes my machine running very slow.
Overall result is very good!

Out of topic: Which is faster? NURBS rendering or SDS rendering?

There is very interesting topic started in Blenderartists:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=106714&highlight=NURBS
And fun to read:)

> The render looks good but in some places you could notice distinct polygons.

Do you mean you notice polygons in the shading, or in the silhouette of the object?

If it is in the silhouette, then yes you can only really solve that by creating more polygons on the export. If it is in the shading then make sure you are getting the good normal information in.


> Out of topic: Which is faster? NURBS rendering or SDS rendering?

Well in most cases both of them are converted into polygons at some point before rendering.

- Michael

I've spent quite some time fooling around with the MoI .obj exporter and Blender. I'm now generally achieving the best results by exporting unwelded vertices and using the Edgesplit modifier in Blender. In most cases, it deals with the smoothing issues. In case you really want to connect all loose vertices (for instance if you want to apply Subsurf or Sculpt your MoI mesh), use the "Remove Doubles" command in Blender, which will merge vertices that are in the same location. I use mostly Indigo for rendering, and it is sometimes picky when rendering flat surfaces generated in MoI. A flat surface would then show with shading differences, with parts of the plane appearing darker than others, even if the Edgesplit modified is used. In such cases, the only workaround I've found that seems to be working is to extract the flat surfaces from the mesh, move them to a separate mesh object and remove the smoothing option. Curved surfaces generally don't have problems. Hope that helps.
I will now try the LWO importer and see whether it works better.

Soooo. I've now tried the MoI-LWO-Blender importer and it seems indeed to be a genuine miracle! Wonderfully clean model!