I thought MoI users who also use Cinema 4D might be interested in this announcement here:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=47&t=896186

I'll probably get this plugin as should make working with MoI and C4D even better :)

Nigel / 3DKiwi

It will not work with MoI. Rhino stores display meshes which can be extracted from the Rhino file. MoI is not using those and I am actually happy about that.
You can also clear that particular mesh in Rhino and I bet that plugin will have a surprise ready then. Either it triggers a re-mesh in Rhino or it will sail into the sunset.
I don't like the internal rhino meshes for reference as they are not very accurate either. I rather export it with 'intentionally set' parameters.
cheers
Rainer

Hi Nigel, yeah it sounds like it won't work with 3DM files from MoI because it does not actually process the NURBS data in the 3DM file, it only grabs render mesh data attached to the NURBS models.

When MoI writes a 3DM file, it only writes NURBS data to the file, and does not store display/render mesh data in there as well.

That's because saving display meshes produces a lot of bloating in file size, often times in Rhino 3DM files the display meshes can increase the file size by many times with render mesh data actually taking up the majority of the increased file size.

Rhino basically has to store the render mesh data because its mesher is very slow to calculate the mesh data. So in order to avoid waiting for a long time for meshes to be generated to make an initial shaded display it stores the display meshes in the file.

MoI solves that problem by just having a very fast mechanism for generating display meshes, so it can do it dynamically when the file is loaded rather that bloating up the file.

Having a fast display mesher also solves other problems as well, because whenever you change a model it has to be re-meshed in order to be displayed. That's why it can be painful to work with Rhino in a shaded display mode, where you'll end up seeing the "calculating meshes" message a lot.


You also can't get the same mesh quality from Rhino display meshes either - the display meshes are limited in several aspects as compared to the meshes you get in OBJ format. For example a Rhino display mesh does not have n-gons in it, and also it cannot have welded points where 2 polygons share the same point but have different uvs or normals.

So because of these limitations, it would not be a good solution for MoI to store render mesh data in 3DM files, you would end up getting a lower quality mesh result than what you can get currently by exporting from MoI in OBJ format.


- Michael

Thanks guys. You saved me some money!!

They did clarify the announcement in the CG Talk thread that MoI doesn't generate render meshes.

Nigel

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost.php?p=6581885&postcount=26
by Stefan Laub
rhino.io

< i also used moi as rhino converter before we made rhino.io, but even though MOI produces "beautiful" tesselation, i still had shading probems with obj too often in render, with rhino.io i had not one single mesh artefact problem anymore. as also moi export was not perfect i initiated this project.

?

Hmmm, that's interesting that he would say that... I don't believe I ever received any bug reports from him about any shading problems with MoI output.

There are a lot of people that experience a variety of meshing problems with Rhino, quite a few people actually purchase MoI just for this one purpose of getting higher quality mesh output than what Rhino is able to produce.

For example, here's a blog post where someone made a side-by-side comparison, going into Cinema4D:
http://www.renderology.com/?p=144


In some of those screenshots you can see one of the general problem areas with Rhino's meshes - when it connects triangles up between trimming boundaries the triangles can tend to kind of stretch out, making a kind of strange flat kink in the mesh.


I have no idea why he thinks there won't be any mesh artifacts. Certainly by extracting the Rhino render mesh he will see the exact same stuff in Cinema4D as seen in Rhino, the problem is that what is seen in Rhino is a long ways from perfect and can have a lot of problems. Just see the above blog post for one specific example...

- Michael

Of course there may be some other reasons why the plugin could be helpful, for example bringing over the same lights and saved views (and various other auxiliary stuff like that) from Rhino into Cinema4D could be a significant help to someone using both of those programs.


But getting higher quality shading? That's a kind of strange thing to claim.

Cinema4D is able to read vertex normals from OBJ files, so you should get the same kind of shading in Cinema4D when you import geometry by OBJ or by this plugin.

I don't understand why someone would think the plugin would generate some kind of "better shading" or "better normals" than what is happening already with OBJ transfer.


Is there possibly a demonstration file that shows a shading problem with a file transferred from Rhino through OBJ that is not present when transferring using this plugin instead?


- Michael

Hi Michael,

my comments where not been against MOI at all, but just the fact that i in our long term studio work sometimes get artifacts when using obj import to c4d. regardless from rhino or moi(or other software).
even though moi produced better obj export than rhino. it definitely wasn't without problems all time (might also be a c4d obj problem, with reptide works somehow better, but all not real good in end and bad structured)

thats why we developed rhino.io for your studio needs , and also made it public to all.
i own and like MOI since very first v1 versions, and 2 beta verisons, and rhino since many many years, and i love both & know both pretty well.

of course it is possible with try ans error to get a more or less clean import into c4d. but it is really much easier from rhino to cinema4d with rhino.io. all my files import just perfect. also it keeps all layers, blocks, hierarchical structures, materials cameras, lights, etc.
it is very true that the tessellation engine is much better in MOI (i would wish rhino had a similar), but also the rhino tessellation does its job and provides internally good meshes for render, i think it is sad that in MOI the meshes cant be saved into the 3dm file. i asked you that many month before some time ago. you said you had no plans to do so due to some limitations you see in the 3dm file, that might e true of course.
still in everyday artist work work flow is essential. and the method rhino.io uses with rhino is juts working perfect.
thats why i meant it would be great if sometime also MOI would have an option to save meshes to the 3dm format and make such plugins possible:-)

i myself love and use MOI along side with rhino(at least until my beta 2 expired last dec.), at the moment one has to open my moi files in rhino and re save to import he scenes easily into c4d. thats an ok work flow, which brings me also perfect render results and suits my work flow. but it would be nice to skip the rhino par sometime and connect also MOI as close as possible to c4d:-)

so i truly hope we have not started an MOI versus Rhino thread here or on cgtalk. as said , we the producer of rhino.io are also MOI users. both is great software
maybe Michael you see a way sometime of adding such a feature ( or have another suggestion how we could in a similar way add direct MOI support).
we would be happy to support moi too of course. many users do ask us for that in fact. so there seem to be a wish for that, and the direct opening of 3dm files in c4d does have quite some advantages.

best greetings
Stefan Laub

rhino.io
vrayforc4d
laublab kg
3dtools.eu

Well just for the record, for artifact / problem free imports from MoI into C4D, I use the Riptide plug-in...

-Will

i do have reptide pro. it is a bit better, but not all time problem free

still many c4d + moi users ask me for full moi scene import vie rhino.io. all that would be needed is that moi saves its meshes optionally in the 3dm file

therefore my suggestion to ad this simple but very very helpful option, as moi user and for our plugin:-)

after all this is a MOI decission, not ours.
we and i personally as i like moi, would welcome such a feature additions.

stefan

Maybe the problem is in C4D.

The MoI -> Modo workflow works a dream, particularly with materials. If I re-import a model in to C4D, perhaps because I have made some change in MoI, C4D messes up the materials I have already spent some time creating.

In contrast, because of Modo's layered approach, Modo imports the new LWO file and adds a new material group. All I have to do is delete the new material group and the masks revert to where I was before the re-import. Dead easy, and something Maxon need to address. Modo's masks directly replicate the styles set in MoI.

I also have Rhino, and one of the big selling points of MoI is it's ability the mesh the Nurbs in a fast, controllable way, with n-gon support and welded vertices. Rhino's meshing is, and always was, horrible. I now use Rhino just for things MoI fails at, like some complex surface creations or hard to do fillets. I still import back to MoI when I've done the Rhino bit.

Why would you want import anything other than meshes anyway? I have the lights and materials set up in Modo, and re-importing the MoI LWO file doesn't disturb them.

I can't really understand the request for MoI to save it's meshes in the 3DM file. It's only 2 clicks to save it out in various formats that can be read by most polygon modellers.

Modo doesn't need this plugin so neither should C4D. I wouldn't like to see the file size of MoI's 3DM filles increase because of a limitation in C4D.

Hi Stefan, well your comments seemed to say that you were having shading problems with MoI's OBJ export.

I was surprised to read that, since I have not heard any mention of such problems going into Cinema4D and I have not received any bug reports or anything from you about that issue.

It seems strange that so many other people are able to transfer data from MoI into Cinema4D without any shading glitches in the slightest.

Do you possibly have any example file that you could post that would show what you were describing?


Maybe you ran into an n-gon triangulation error in Cinema4D. If that was the case, for that particular file you could use "Output: Quads & Triangles" when saving the OBJ from MoI to make MoI triangulate the n-gon instead of it happening in C4D. Generally C4D is very good at dealing with n-gons, but that is the one area where it will do some fairly complex additional processing on import.


> it is very true that the tessellation engine is much better in MOI
> (i would wish rhino had a similar), but also the rhino tessellation
> does its job and provides internally good meshes for render

Actually a lot of people find this to be not true at all - for example see this person's blog post:
http://www.renderology.com/?p=144

Notice there how Rhino put in a kind of large flat polygon in an area that should be rounded? That's one of the most common meshing glitches that people often run into with Rhino, that one also impacts the shape of the mesh considerably and is noticeable in renders.


> also it keeps all layers, blocks, hierarchical structures,
> materials cameras, lights, etc.

Certainly this part could be useful to many people.

But it is confusing to me why you would claim to get better shading along with that - especially if all you are transferring is quads and triangles and there is no n-gon processing going on, then the exact same vertex normals will be transferred using OBJ format.

Why do you think the vertex normals that you are accessing are somehow better than the ones that are transferred by OBJ? Normals are normals.... it is confusing to me why you would think that you somehow have "better normals" or something like that.


> i asked you that many month before some time ago. you
> said you had no plans to do so due to some limitations you
> see in the 3dm file, that might e true of course.

Well yes, it is true - 3DM format is not the ideal place to store mesh data because it is limited in several ways, see this previous post for some examples:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3642.3


But my main concern is that you mention shading problems where I have not heard of any such problems from other users. If you could give any example file that demonstrates those problems, it would help me understand what you may have been running into.

That's actually one of the nice things about Cinema4D - specifically that it reads vertex normals from OBJ files so that you get the exact same shading as was seen on the NURBS surface.

- Michael

Hi Stefan, just one other note re: adding display meshes into saved 3DM files.

MoI actually has 2 somewhat different meshers that are used for different purposes.

There is a "display mesher" and then there is an "export mesher".

The display mesher's job is to very quickly create meshes to produce the shaded viewport display. Sometimes it takes some shortcuts in order to be fast, and in the future on heavy scenes it will probably automatically make somewhat rougher meshes to reduce memory footprint on detailed models.

When you save to a file format like OBJ or LWO, that uses the "export mesher", which is slower (well not as much anymore with the multi-core processing added in v2, but still) but also does a more careful job and is focused on making a higher quality more evenly proportioned mesh.


You seem to be asking about saving the "display mesh" results in the 3DM file?

The bad part about that is that you would then not be getting the higher quality mesh calculation that is normally done with other mesh exports.


That's on top of the limitations on mesh structure that are imposed by 3DM format.


So it's not really a great solution - there are several reasons why you would not be getting the highest quality mesh results if I just dumped the display mesh into the 3DM file, and then of course there would be a huge increase in the size of the 3DM file as well.

- Michael

In other words, it's a pointless plugin.

Is there any update for this plugin so that MOI also works?
Im sorry to ask this, but we are curently planing on going to Cinema4D.
Will workflow MoI for modeling and C4D for rendering work?
Thanx!

Hi Kreten,

> Will workflow MoI for modeling and C4D for rendering work?

Yes - for C4D you can export using OBJ format out of MoI. That's the most common format that is usually supported by nearly every renderer.

C4D's regular built-in OBJ importer works fine, other than one thing which is that it does not import the colors of materials (which in MoI are called styles).

If you want those to come through, get the Riptide plug-in from here and use it for the import into C4D instead of the default OBJ import:
http://skinprops.com/riptide.php

There are quite a lot of people who model in MoI and render in C4D using OBJ format for doing the transfer.

- Michael

Hi Michael!
Seems ok for me.
You said the colors wont export - no problem, but all the material that I have in MoI will also be present in Cinema?

Hi Kreten,

> You said the colors wont export - no problem, but all the
> material that I have in MoI will also be present in Cinema?

Yeah with the default OBJ importer in C4D, the material _assignments_ themselves (the assignment of each polygon face to a particular material slot) do come through, it's the material properties themselves (which for MoI is just diffuse color) which don't. I can't remember if the actual list of materials comes through or not. But for sure the polygon assignments do.

But like I mentioned above, you can fix this problem as well if you use the RipTide plug-in for the C4D OBJ import, which is available for free from here:
http://skinprops.com/riptide.php

If you use the RipTide OBJ importer everything will come through including the materials list and material colors.

- Michael

I recently switched to cinema 4D and I bought MoI primary for its superb polygone model export. It is really the best tool I have ever seen since starting with 3D Studio 20 years ago.

You will have much fun with Cinema and MoI!

I am just waiting for MoI in 64 Bit to import LARGER CAD files! ;-)

Best regards
BLADE

blade

i think the same about MOI but i am still curious to hear what you think are MOI's main advantages
over those other programs. in particular i would like your opinion on apple for apple basis (basic modelling features)....
whatever is within your knowledge!

thanks

mario