Render MOI Curves in Modo.

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 From:  andy (ANDYJAGGY)
3857.1 
Is it possible to export my curves to Modo so I can render them on top of my mesh?
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 From:  Michael Gibson
3857.2 In reply to 3857.1 
Hi Andy, no there isn't any way that I know of to export curves to Modo.

I don't believe that Modo actually has NURBS curve entities inside of it? The last time I checked it used some different kind of spline curve (not NURBS) for paths and stuff like that.

But another approach that you could use would be to take a screenshot of MoI and then composite that with the rendering. PaQ has done that a few times and I set up a script for him so that the camera view in MoI could be matched with the one in Modo, see this previous thread:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3644.1

- Michael
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 From:  Michael Gibson
3857.3 In reply to 3857.1 
Hi Andy, also for reference - MoI can export 3D NURBS curves to 3DM, IGES, SAT, or STEP file formats, so if you know of any way to import curve data from those formats into Modo then that would work.

But those are all CAD-oriented formats which many polygon modelers may not support.

- Michael
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 From:  andy (ANDYJAGGY)
3857.4 In reply to 3857.3 
No modo does not support nurbs curves. I thought perhaps there was a way to export them as poly lines or 2 point polygons.

I saw the render by PAQ with the moi curves overlayed on his Modo render and therefore thought that there was a way to do it.

Andy
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 From:  Michael Gibson
3857.5 In reply to 3857.4 
Hi Andy,

> I thought perhaps there was a way to export them as
> poly lines or 2 point polygons.

It is actually possible to export curves as polylines to SKP format currently - I think at one point Modo had an SKP importer?

But there is not any way currently to export curves as line segments into an LWO file.

That could be possible to add in the future, but having more than one possible way to do it (as polylines or as a "2 point polygon") makes it a bit confusing to figure out the best way - would one of those methods be better than the other?

The file format documentation for the LWO format is not particularly clear about how curves or polylines should be stored in the file, it says:

quote:

Polygon List
POLS { type[ID4], ( numvert+flags[U2], vert[VX] # numvert )* }

A list of polygons for the current layer. Possible polygon types include:

FACE
"Regular" polygons, the most common.

CURV
Catmull-Rom splines. These are used during modeling and are currently ignored by the renderer.

PTCH
Subdivision patches. The POLS chunk contains the definition of the control cage polygons, and the patch is created by subdividing these polygons. The renderable geometry that results from subdivision is determined interactively by the user through settings within LightWave®. The subdivision method is undocumented.

MBAL
Metaballs. These are single-point polygons. The points are associated with a VMAP of type MBAL that contains the radius of influence of each metaball. The renderable polygonal surface constructed from a set of metaballs is inferred as an isosurface on a scalar field derived from the sum of the influences of all of the metaball points.

BONE
Line segments representing the object's skeleton. These are converted to bones for deformation during rendering.


So I'm not really sure if the lines are supposed to be a "FACE" type with only 2 points in it, or whether it is supposed to be a "CURV" type or a "BONE" type.

Could you maybe post a small simple LWO file with some lines in it exported from Modo? That could then be a reference for me to use later on when I get a chance to implement it.

- Michael
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 From:  andy (ANDYJAGGY)
3857.6 In reply to 3857.5 
I attached a LWO file exported out of modo with some polygon lines included. Thanks for your help.

Another thought I had was sweeping a small circle along all the curves... and then exporting it as regular geometry. That might be a lot of work though.
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 From:  Michael Gibson
3857.7 In reply to 3857.6 
Hi Andy, thanks for the sample file - looking at that file it seems that it just has the regular polygon face entities in there so that's good to know that it doesn't need to be a different kind of object.

> Another thought I had was sweeping a small circle
> along all the curves... and then exporting it as regular
> geometry. That might be a lot of work though.

This could be a possibility, but one thing to watch out for is that a long tube with a small diameter in NURBS tends to be pretty heavy geometry, it makes a really tightly curved little thing. It's easy for things like the file size to balloon very significantly if you have a whole lot of little tightly curved things like that.

But as far as creating the little tubes, you can use sweep in a kind of batch mode with a lot of curves by drawing the circle off to the side away from the curves (it should be outside of the bounding box around them all), and then when selecting rails select all the curves all at once, that will do a 1 rail sweep around each of them with "auto place" mode so that you don't have to position the circle around each curve individually.

That looks something like this:





To select all edges as sweep rails you can select 1 edge of a solid and then do Ctrl+A to then make all its edges selected, or you can use the the Scene Browser Types section to select all edges in the entire model in 1 click.

But again, this method may get pretty unwieldy in data size if you're going to do it to hundreds of things.

- Michael

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 From:  andy (ANDYJAGGY)
3857.8 In reply to 3857.7 
Yeah it sounds like that might be a solution for simple objects, but for what I have in mind it would probably become pretty unwieldy.

So it sonds like the solution right now for stills is to do what PAQ did, and do a render overlay by matching up the MOI viewport with my Modo camera.

For animation it sounds like I am out of luck, unless I can find a .skp importer for modo that will import the poly lines.

Again thanks for all your help.

Andy
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 From:  andy (ANDYJAGGY)
3857.9 In reply to 3857.8 
Just thought of another solution. I use 3D Max in conjunction with Modo. 3D Max will import several different types of nurbs objects, as well as .skp format. I could then export my camera from Modo to Max, render my curves in Max, and then overlay them in post. I will try it out when I get a chance.
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 From:  andy (ANDYJAGGY)
3857.10 In reply to 3857.9 
Okay my idea worked. I exported the moi object as an obj and brought that geometry into Modo. Then I deleted everything but the edges and curves, and exported that as an Iges file. I imported that into Max where I then exported them as splines back into Modo. Luckily the scale stayed consistent between all the import and exports and the splines lined up perfectly.

Granted this is a pretty simple object but I have faith that this will work with very complex objects as well. Animated Moi wireframe objects here I come. ;)
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 From:  Michael Gibson
3857.11 In reply to 3857.10 
I'm glad you have a workable method Andy, I hope you'll post a link to some of your animations when you make them!

- Michael
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 From:  PaQ
3857.12 
Hi Andy,

What format are you using to export spline from 3dsmax to modo ?
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