Hi Rich, Michael is right in his description of the situation with Maxwell. With exports in triangulated OBJ format everything must be OK, but working with this in Cinema is horribly (selecting, unwrapping, etc.).
I use n-gons mesh and triangulate it just before hitting render button. The trick is in triangulation without breaking vertex normals. For this I take a few steps:

1. Select imported polygon object(s)

2. Functions > Remove N-gons

3. Select all points

4. Structure > Connect

5. Render Scene

> I also tried a standard OBJ import but that gave me shading errors.

Hm, I have worked well in Cinema 4d R11.532. Of course, "Import normals" checkbox must be set.


Regards
L_AN

Hi L_AN, thanks for those steps on triangulating within C4D without losing normals!

Of course, if it is possible to do that with a few manual steps like that, it seems like it should also be possible for the Maxwell plug-in to do the equivalent thing so that you would not have to worry about this issue at all.

I would recommend contacting Maxwell support and asking them to improve their plugin to remove this problem where their plugin ignores the normal tag on all but triangulated geometry. If they need triangles, there should be some method in C4D that will allow them access to C4D's triangulation which includes the normals. That's what C4D's own built-in renderer does.

Including the normals is a very important thing for any rendering program, so they should never be ignored like that.

- Michael