New Rhino / Cinema 4D Import / Export Plugin announced
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 From:  Michael Gibson
3642.12 In reply to 3642.8 
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
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 From:  Michael Gibson
3642.13 In reply to 3642.8 
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
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 From:  SteveMacc (STEVEH)
3642.14 
In other words, it's a pointless plugin.
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 From:  Kreten
3642.15 
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!
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 From:  Michael Gibson
3642.16 In reply to 3642.15 
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
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 From:  Kreten
3642.17 
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?
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 From:  Michael Gibson
3642.18 In reply to 3642.17 
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
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 From:  BLADE
3642.19 In reply to 3642.18 
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
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 From:  mariomarimba
3642.20 In reply to 3642.19 
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
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