>if the problems you are seeing is a lack of smoothness when importing into Max 9 in particular,
> that may be greatly helped out by >getting the updated FBX import plug-in.

That is fantastic news as that is the main reason I gave up on Rhino in the past was inability to create a decent mesh from all the surfaces.

I've downloaded the latest FBX plugin for Max 9 so, I'll give it a go and let you know if it gives better results.

PS Max seems to import OBJ format just fine. The messy mesh joints occur in MoI and Rhino. Both programs have trouble stitching the mesh together at the nurb surface joints. The problem is much less in MoI compared to Rhino.

Hi Kevin, well if the joints do not look right in MoI then the FBX export is not going to help with that particular problem.

If you have an example of that it could help if I could see it.

But my guess would be that you had an export where you had 2 surfaces that were separate objects that were sitting next to each other, rather than having them joined together to be a single connected object.

You need to join surfaces together to have shared edges before you export - if you don't they get meshed individually without any awareness of each other and they can get slightly different vertex structures along their adjacent edges, creating small gaps or cracks.

When they are joined together to be part of one larger object that has shared edges, the edges will be treated with special attention to have a fully compatible vertex structure along the shared edges, so no cracks or gaps will happen there.

So be sure to use Edit/Join to glue surfaces together to have shared edges before you export and that will solve that problem, if that is what you were seeing. That applies to Rhino and MoI both actually.


> PS Max seems to import OBJ format just fine.

Sort of - I mean it brings the polygons over but did not seem to bring the vertex normals over, so it calculated shading by averaging polygon normals together instead of using the true normals that come from the original NURBS surfaces. When shading is done with the true normals it eliminates a lot of shading artifacts and gives a much smoother appearance.

- Michael