I have a quick question:

It seems that no matter what units are selected in MoI, after export to .lwo, the unit in Lightwave is always a meter. Am I doing something incorrectly?

I have my default unit in Lightwave options set at inch. There may be another setting somewhere that I am not aware of, but I think that is the only place there is to set the unit.

Its not a big deal to scale down later, but just thought I would see if I could save a step.

Thanks,

Nathan

Hi Nathan, you're not doing anything wrong.

The LWO file format doesn't have any setting within it for what unit system the file uses, at least none that Newtek has documented.

So apparently the convention is that the LWO file should always be in meters.

Right now MoI does not do any kind of scaling when it writes the LWO file, it just write out your data directly, like a coordinate of 0,5,0 is just written out as 0,5,0 regardless of what units you are currently using in MoI.

I guess that I should scale your objects when you write out the LWO file so that the final stored number is in meters. But I'm a little bit worried to make this change enabled by default, since it may give unexpected results to some people like if you open an IGES file that was in inches and then export that to LWO the scaled result will be rather small...

So I'm thinking that maybe I can make this unit scaling an optional thing that you can enable by editing a flag in the moi.ini file, does that sound ok?

- Michael

Michael-

That would be fine with me, if it is worth the time to implement. It would be a convenient option, but not an absolute necessity. It is easy to scale in LW or MoI (I find MoI easier). It just seemed strange to me to have both programs defaulting to inch units, and winding up with everything in meters.

Thanks for you quick attention!

nathan

Hi Nathan, I am trying to avoid making very many changes right before V1, but this one happens to be a pretty easy one.

I don't have LightWave over here though, so can you please test it to make sure it works properly?

You can grab a new patch from here: http://moi3d.com/beta/LWO_units_patch.zip . That will unzip to a new moi_lib.dll file which you need to copy over top of the old version in C:\Program Files\MoI beta Sep-4-2007\ .

Then you need to open up the moi.ini file with a text editor like notepad. You should be able to find the moi.ini file here: C:\Documents and Settings\ [your login name] \Application Data\Moi\moi.ini

Add these 2 lines to the very end of the file:

[LWO]
ScaleToMeters=y


With that stuff in place, then when you export to LWO your objects will be scaled to be converted into a meters unit system inside the LWO file which it seems like LightWave was expecting. Please let me know if this seems to be reversed or doesn't work as expected...

Thanks!
- Michael

Michael,

I think it works. I attached screen shots of my test in case you need them.

Thanks!

Nathan

Hi Nathan that's great! You're welcome!

One less step for your exports...

- Michael

Thank you very, very much for this fix. This helps me tremendously as I am rendering alot of parts that will be made for production. Here is one of them, but just a clay render as I cannot show the real deal yet with logos and such.

Modeled in SolidWorks and exported as .IGES to Moi and exported to .LWO and brought into MODO....

Great, I'm glad that is useful!

Maybe I should have this turned on by default instead of something that needs to be switched on, I'm just not sure if it may scale things to be rather small if people haven't set up their units in Modo or LightWave...

- Michael