Hi Everyone,

I've just downloaded 3D-Coat in the hope of using it's Voxel Sculpting for some of jewellery models I need to make.
What I'm hoping is that someone can offer me some advice on "what OBJ settings" to use when Exporting from MoI?
Ideally what I'm looking for is if there's "anything specific" that I'd need to beware of when working between MoI & 3D-Coat??
This is totally new ground for me, so forgive me if I'm asking for help with something blatantly obvious?

I've created a basic ring model in MoI to use as my test base & have tried it as both STL & OBJ Import into 3D-Coat.
The MoI Export setting I use for STL's is:
Angle = 3
Divide Larger Than: = 0.5 or 0.2 (I've tried both values)

The resulting STL's will come into the 3DC Voxel room OK, but all of the edges of the model aren't sharp, it's like they've all been notched?
Also tried the OBJ Export, but as I've never needed to use this format before, I'm unfamiliar with what's the best settings to start at?

Here's my 3DM model for those that wish to do their own MoI Export/3DC Import tests.

regards Colin

Hi Colin,

3Dcoat places a voxel layer on top of the imported mesh.
The mesh itself won't be used anymore.

You can increase the voxel resolution by scaling the mesh before you tick the enter key.
Another way is the "Inc. res" button,in the commands section.

Be aware that increasing the resolution,the computer needs al lot of memory.

Hi Colin, you will probably want to ask in the 3D-Coat forum:
http://3d-coat.com/forum/index.php


For OBJ format probably the only option you may want to tweak is to set Output: Quads & Triangles rather than Output: N-gons, just to avoid any potential N-gon processing problems (which can tend to happen if a program has not been tested a lot with receiving complex polygons with a lot of points in them).

Other than that the same settings you use for STL would be fine, it's probably a good idea to use the "Divide larger than" like you were doing already to dice up the polygons into some smaller regular sized pieces.

Then like Paolo mentions you will probably need to adjust some settings on 3D-Coat to increase the voxel resolution.

OBJ may give you some better results in this case than STL because OBJ files contain some more information in them about which places are supposed to be hard (creased) edges are which places are actually supposed to appear as if they were smooth. So I would probably go for OBJ format for this kind of translation, it just gives 3D-coat more chance to understand how the model is supposed to be set up.

Also I think that 3D-Coat has a special version available (called the "CUDA" version) which can handle denser voxel settings more easily if you have a supported video card.


But you will probably want to post a screenshot and sample OBJ file over in the 3D-coat forum to get the best details back.

- Michael

Hi Paolo,

Thanks for that info, much appreciated.

At present I'm bringing the STL in via the Voxel Room> Import> Merge Object, then I scale it up by 10.
I then hit Enter for the Scale & click the Apply button, I also get a message about the Merge & click Yes to that too.
Going by what you've said it sounds like I'm doing it right.
Here's a screen capture of what I'm getting once it's first loaded, but without anything other than the Scale applied.

So I guess my next question would be "What's the better option?"...Command> Smooth All or Commands> Inc. Res??

regard Colin

Hi Colin, you also may want to scale it up by 10 times in MoI first, rather than doing it after the import into the Voxel Room.

Possibly the conversion to voxels (voxels are little boxes similar to a bitmap pixel, it stands for "volume pixel") is happening during the initial import step and when you scale up, you are scaling the already voxelized result up.

So it's kind of similar to how you can get visible jaggies to appear when you try to scale up a small bitmap to a larger size.


For OBJ export, there is a scale factor that you can have applied to your export automatically by setting the option in MoI under Options > Import/Export > OBJ options > Scale factor. That may be useful for this case.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the OBJ info, those settings at least give me a start point.
And as you've suggested, I've just finished posting my STL files over at 3D-Coat Forum to see if someone can offer their advice.

So wondering if I would I keep the "Weld Vertices" ticked ON when doing the OBJ Export from MoI in these cases?

regards Colin

Hi Colin,

> So wondering if I would I keep the "Weld Vertices" ticked
> ON when doing the OBJ Export from MoI in these cases?

Probably it will make no difference - that means where there are 2 polygons from different surfaces that touch one another, whether there will be a single 3D vertex that they share in common ("welded"), or whether each polygon will have its own separate vertices but they are stacked up on top of each other in the same location.

Probably you would want it welded if you were going to be mushing the polygon data itself around, but if you are doing voxel editing you are not doing that, the polygons are converted into voxels when you bring them in and then you are working a big soup of voxel information instead of polygon information after that.

An "unwelded" OBJ file does have a slightly less complicated structure to it though, so unchecking weld is something that you can try if a program just seems to be choking on trying to figure out how to read the file at all. I think that particular thing is not too likely to be an issue here though.

- Michael

For great results in 3D Coat consider this version if you are organised for it.

3D Coat 64bit (or 32bit) Cuda/DX

Brian