Lots to read :)
And lots of helpful information for a newbie like myself! Thanks guys!

PaQ - thanks for that Lux TV video, it was good. I'll try to hunt some more down.

So am I correct in saying this:

A material can be applied to an object in two ways...

a) an item mask - for any item to have that material
b) poly tags - for any polygons to have that material

Hmm, could someone tell me what the difference is between these two trees:


(a poorly done photoshop of Steve's example tree :)

I'm wondering what the extra nodes in the tree are for? Do they do anything, or are they just like folders that hold things (and thus there's no point in having a folder in a folder)?



So it sounds like I should use MoI's Styles to define each of the end model's material groups in modo?


(Michael)
> In the future I want to add a kind of "direction showing mode" that would show the negative surface side
> of the object in MoI in red so that you could more easily see which side was which. Right now there isn't
> anything for that, mostly because there isn't really anything in MoI itself that is particularly sensitive to that.

Ah that sounds perfect :)

Also, does the MoI option for LWO files "scale output units to meters" literally convert each 1 unit of MoI to a meter in Modo?
(what's the best way to deal with smaller units?)





> What the deuce!? I never saw that option before. D'oh!

Lucky it's enabled by default then :D

Hi NightCabbage,

> So it sounds like I should use MoI's Styles to define each
> of the end model's material groups in modo?

Yup, that's one of the main purposes for MoI's Styles mechanism - to give you a way to set up material assignments for exporting to LWO and OBJ formats.


> Also, does the MoI option for LWO files "scale output units to meters"
> literally convert each 1 unit of MoI to a meter in Modo?
> (what's the best way to deal with smaller units?)

LWO files don't have any way to mark what units the file are in, and the way that Modo works it assumes that the units of the LWO file are in meters.

So for example if you create a line that has length = 5 cm in MoI and save it to LWO, Modo will actually interpret that value of 5 as being 5 meters.

But if you enable that option, then MoI will scale what it writes into the LWO file to convert it to meters, so for example if you have 5 cm in MoI with that option enabled it will scale all coordinates by 0.01 to convert from cm into meters, resulting in the value of 0.05 being written to the file. Then when Modo reads it, it will see the value as 0.05 meters which will be the same size as your original 5 cm in MoI.


Modo is not the only program that works with LWO files though, and other programs may not have the same "assume the LWO file is in meters" behavior to it, that's why that's an option to do the scaling.

- Michael

>>A material can be applied to an object in two ways...

a) an item mask - for any item to have that material
b) poly tags - for any polygons to have that material

Hmm, could someone tell me what the difference is between these two trees:


(a poorly done photoshop of Steve's example tree :)

I'm wondering what the extra nodes in the tree are for? Do they do anything, or are they just like folders that hold things (and thus there's no point in having a folder in a folder)?
>>>

If you look at the properties of a shader group in Modo, there are various ways to control what it does. These groups are essentially masks, and Modo applies the materials starting at the bottom of the tree and working upwards. Things higher in the tree override lower items universally unless they are restricted in some way by a mask. The mask can be by Item or by a Polygon Selection. In my example the Chromium Plate Cast is a group that has no restriction (the polygon tag field is set to "All"). It is a convenient way to group a preset. The whole preset can be swapped by deleting the group and adding a new preset. However, it is the child of the Matr: chrome group. This restricts itself and any of it's children to the polygon selection "chrome" (MoIs style applied to objects and faces). A slightly more complex but very useful attribute is the "Apply to Sub Group" option, which then takes the masking from the child groups. This allows you to set one material as the first child of the group and have it apply to all masks that are also children of the group but not to anything else.


Modo's shader tree is quite different to other 3D apps (it is much more like Photoshop layers)and requires a bit of study to fully understand it. One thing that helps enormously in debugging the shader tree is the Render Preview Window. If you right click the preview window, the pixel under the mouse is evaluated and a pop-up shows the items in the shader tree that have contributed to that pixel. You can then click on an item in that list and be taken straight to that item in the shader tree. I have attached a screen shot of the effect of right clicking the preview window.

There are some good tutorials on Luxology's web site. In the on line help for Modo there are a number of videos that explain the shader tree and masks in depth.

Hey Michael!
Just wanted to tell this issue with the vertex map. And since I'm new to Modo and just testing MoI this was an issue I couldn't solve for a day and was really happy to have found the comments and this tutorial I've mentioned.
So my intention was to export some l beveled objects (lots of facets) to further render in Modo and so I didn't know what was going on at this time.

My suggestion would be to implement a checkbox for switching on and of this v-map-export even to clear things up.

Vertex Maps are exported from MoI and imported by Modo. There is no need for an option.

You are using .LWO as an export format, aren't you? IGES doesn't work as well as LWO.

Hi Anton, could you describe a bit more about what the actual problem is that you were seeing?

Were you trying to edit the object somehow after importing it into Modo?

Vertex normals should not cause any problems if you are just importing your file and rendering it - on the contrary they actually help out significantly in that situation because they make the shading look better.

But if you were doing some kind of other steps than just simply rendering it, then you could possibly need to clear the vertex normals - but that's actually what I would consider a bug in Modo's handling of vertex normals, they should automatically clear the vertex normals and also update them in some situations where they currently do not. Hopefully this will get improved in Modo at some point so that you won't need to do any manual step of clearing normals over there.


> My suggestion would be to implement a checkbox for
> switching on and of this v-map-export even to clear things up.

I'm still not clear on what the problem was...

Under the typical circumstances of just importing a LWO file into Modo and rendering it, there should not be any need to delete the vertex normal map.

- Michael

Ok, this is absolutely cool to have vertex-maps if you are about to render a NURBS-like effect.
In contrast (only my design approach in my test project!) if you are about to render the faceted mesh which you are seeing while exporting the mesh and dragging the polygon slider then I was really annoyed (never dealt with vertex maps so far) that I couldn't get the clue, even when switching off the smooth option in the assigned material, why there wouldn't be any facets at all.
For any non-expert switching over to Modo (and case he also wants faceted geometry rendered in Modo) this would be only an comprehensible option to get a clue what's going on.

Cheers,
A

Hi Anton I see - but that's a pretty unusual circumstance to actually want to render a faceted look to your objects rather than a smooth render.


> For any non-expert switching over to Modo (and case he also
> wants faceted geometry rendered in Modo) this would be only
> an comprehensible option to get a clue what's going on.

I'm not really sure that having a checkbox for disabling vertex normals would actually solve this problem... For example if someone didn't know how vertex normals would affect their rendering it would also be easy for them to not know they had to uncheck that option (and then also adjust the material properties in Modo) in order to get a faceted render look.

I think it's just something that you need to know how to work in Modo - if you have any vertex normal map it should be deleted to get that effect.

That's a good thing to know how to work in Modo because other kinds of file imports into Modo can also create vertex normals, like importing an OBJ file for example. So if you don't learn how Modo works you could easily run into the same problems when importing other kinds of files from other programs as well.


> then I was really annoyed (never dealt with vertex maps so far)
> that I couldn't get the clue, even when switching off the smooth
> option in the assigned material, why there wouldn't be any
> facets at all.

Yes, it seems like that could be some confusing UI in Modo, where it looks like you are disabling smoothing but nothing happens.

Maybe you could report that UI problem to Luxology and see if they can improve the UI so that it won't be so confusing in that particular area. Possibly if you disable smoothing in the material it could stop vertex normals from being used or something like that.

- Michael

> then I was really annoyed (never dealt with vertex maps so far)
> that I couldn't get the clue, even when switching off the smooth
> option in the assigned material, why there wouldn't be any
> facets at all.

Because a vertex map is active, any change of the smoothing angle in the surface editor isn't take into account.
To remove the vertex map :

List / Other maps / Right click on Vertex map and choose delete.