Thanks Michael !

Seems you're everywhere, just like Frenchy Pilou ! ;-)
Very recent thread on Luxo forum. I'm gonna see if I can contribute to the topic there...
Cya

>The .obj model is a bit large so I'm not posting that right now. I'm hoping to put together a version with this new mesher pretty soon.

It's good that it didn't have problems. Roland's Modela 4 crashed on the .stl generated by rhino repeatedly, and when I was testing the rib generated by rhino in gelato there were weird artifacts around the front fender.

Just want to say thanks Schbeurd and RazorX for helping me get my post on the Lux site related back to this site and your participation on both.

I really hope Lux listens and works Modo into handling the CAD side of things more. I see this part of the industry becoming HUGE over the next few years and I Would really like to use Modo in my pipeline.

Also, Michael your program is excellent thus far and although still in beta, it's exporter is probably the best I have seen so far when it comes to ease of use and results. Hell, actually the whole program is kick ass so far.

Thanks

> Also, Michael your program is excellent thus far and although still in
> beta, it's exporter is probably the best I have seen so far when it
> comes to ease of use and results.

Thanks Slayer, I'm glad the exporter is working well for you.

The next version coming up in a couple of days has a huge overhaul to this area though, it completely blows away the current beta version.

So if you like the current version's exporter, I think you will really, really like the next one.

It's more than just full ngon support, with the new exporter you also have a lot more fine tuned control over the output. The output grows very incrementally in density so you can move the slider up just a little bit to smooth things out in small steps. The current beta has a problem in this area, where things kind of come in big steps, and if you want just a little bit more density sometimes you have to go until things get doubled everywhere. This is not really a problem with the new one.

So far it appears that the only negative thing about the new one is that it is a pretty heavy number cruncher, I think it is a bit slower than the current one. I'm not too focused on that though, for exporting it is not too terrible if you have to wait 30 seconds or something, if you can get really high quality results.

- Michael

I should mention that the one coming in a couple of days still isn't going to be completely finished, it will have ngons that have their vertices all arranged properly, but it won't have automatic welding yet, you'll still need to a weld or merge vertices or whatever your particular program calls it. Doing this automatically will be coming along afterwards.

- Michael

This is awesome news and I look forward to playing/testing with it. I hope the fixes help some of the issues with Modo, but sadly I think the changes will need to come from their end.

Thanks

> but sadly I think the changes will need to come from their end.

Yes, this is probably true. If they don't have the type of mesh structure where two adjacent faces can share the same vertex, but let each face have its own unique vertex normal, then that's going to prevent it from being able to read in .obj files in their full fidelity. MoI won't produce .obj files with this type of structure quite yet, but it will once the next phase of handling the welding is done.

But there is still some additional stuff that I can do that might help - I can also define smoothing groups inside the .obj file, and if they process those then I can probably get it set up a lot better than when you try to do a merge with break angles.

- Michael

>So far it appears that the only negative thing about the new one is that it is a pretty heavy number cruncher, I think it is a bit slower than the current one.

Can you run that sort of calculation through the GPU? :-)

> Can you run that sort of calculation through the GPU? :-)

It's theoretically possible, but it would be quite enormously difficult to regear it all to do that.

- Michael

> Just want to say thanks Schbeurd and RazorX for helping me get my post on the Lux site related back to this site and your participation on both.

You're welcome ! ;-)
I'm still a Modo newbie but I'm planning to use it more and more in the future. The same applies for MoI so it's quite normal that I hope they will interact smoothly !
As long as Michael does not consider his work on the exporter as finished I will not insist too much on this (at Luxology side). Seems we have at least two betas before us (next one and the one where vertices will be merged) but once the MoI exporter is completely finished I will try to report the remaining problems, if any, to Lux.
Cya

Dito. Modo is the easiest polygon modeler I've dealt with, and moi the easiest NURBS base modeler. I'm really really hoping Modo will have 3dm support down the road so that moi creations can be natively viewed and rendered without having to worry about exporting to obj.

>It's theoretically possible, but it would be quite enormously difficult to regear it all to do that.

:-) Of course. Just a thought on my part.

I'm down to just one last tricky area to fix up before having this new beta ready with the ngons. Hopefully be done tomorrow.

- Michael

>> I'm down to just one last tricky area to fix up before having this new beta ready with the ngons. Hopefully be done tomorrow.

Cool !
Other changes or bug fixes than the new exporter ?

> Cool !
> Other changes or bug fixes than the new exporter ?

No, not really - everything else has been put on hold temporarily.

- Michael