Hi Leonard, is there still a "normals" tag in C4D after you have done your editing, or has it automatically removed it?

If it did not remove it automatically, you may need to do it manually - that's again a polygon modeling issue - the vertex normals need to be recalculated when you jiggle vertices around.

You may need to post some of these polygon editing problems on a Cinema4D forum, I'm just not familiar enough with C4D's polygon modeling tools to give you a whole lot of specific C4D poly modeling advice.


You may be getting some kind of unwanted smoothing between the different adjacent pieces, maybe try manipulating the smoothing angle in C4D, or you may try exporting from MoI with welding disabled so that the vertices of adjacent pieces are separate. But try to group select them to manipulate them all at once if that is possible to avoid opening gaps between them.


Or you may be able to select a group of faces and set them as a smoothing group so that the smoothing does not leak between different sections of your model. Again, that's just another polygon modeling technique that does not really have much to do with MoI specifically.


You may have some easier time making those kinds of edits if you had separate objects there that just punched through each other rather than having an actual single solid object where the vertices were all connected to one another. Like for instance make the piping its own object rather than having it actually connected to the other pieces. That will help to keep its smooth shading separate from the others. Just let the pieces punch through each other instead of actually having them booleaned into a single piece. Sorry I did not give you this advice earlier, I did not quite realize that you were going to try to make those kind of edits right near those juncture areas.


- Michael

I am probably mising some connections --again!--but I can not understand why there is a problem?
(I generally,other times, save as n-gons to use in Carrara)

In this instance, after "softening" in Carrara I can do this easily.
Is that what is wanted?

Brian

Hi Brian, different polygon apps can work in slightly different ways.

If the polygon smooth shading ends up crossing over what should be a sharp corner, it can make some kinds of shading artifacts.

Some programs may automatically manage polygons to cluster them by angle to decide where to make shading breaks, and some programs may need for it to be specified manually.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

> ...is there still a "normals" tag in C4D...

That was it. Deleting the Base Tag [Normal] and the aberrations disappeared.

Moreover, I did not follow your suggestion posted somewhere, sometime ago, "It is not necessary to use Riptide to import into C4D." Riptide adds three tags exacerbating the problem. Strip those out plus the normal tag and the Riptide import is fine. But, you are right, Riptide is unnecessary.

This has been about working within the overlap of two modeling apps and how well Moi plays in C4D's environment. Tweaking remains but Moi's mesh is good to go.

Thanks for all the help, Michael.

Leonard

No problem Leonard, I'm glad that you are getting the results you wanted now!

Yeah with that normals tag still in place, it was basically trying to use the shading information from the original imported mesh which did not match your edited result any more.

Re: Riptide - if I remember right, there is some stuff that Riptide supports that the stock OBJ importer does not... I think it might have been reading in the material colors from the companion .mtl file.

So although Riptide does not seem to be necessary for bringing in the basic geometry, if you want to bring in all materials on a more complex model where you may have a few dozen styles set up in MoI, then it may be more useful.

- Michael

Michael, it seems every time you help someone out, you expand my knowledge about the subject. The Riptide comments you volunteered explained some of the how and why of Riptide that no other source has provided. Also, no fragmented odds and ends from you; you always provide the full explanation. You are a one and only. Thanks again.

BTW. If you could harvest the nuggets you, and others, have provided here it would make one hell of a manual or six. Coming from you, the manual would certainly be more useful than most.

Leonard