Have you heard about that render engine?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bDaRXvXG0E&feature=related

I have tried and it is amazing! :-)

Yes! I did see this David looks very cool, maybe the link should be posted on other Render vendor forums ;)

-

I'm enjoying a lot of this morning. :-)

I have export my ship to Blender, and I can see the final render in real time!
And I can't use my graphic card, only CPU! (anyway my graphic card is not powerful). If I had a good graphic card.... :-)

The white rectangle is a mesh emitter :-)

Seems very apettizing!

I wish that they would update their system to work with vertex normals better like every other rendering program does.

The new version of Blender does not seem to import vertex normals from OBJ files, so it's hard to get the precise shading information over to it. Instead it will just shade things using vertex normals that are averaged between polygon faces, which can tend to leave some kinds of shading artifacts.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

I don´t know, if it helps, but there is a possibility to recalculate the normals.

RUdl

Hi Rudl - it's actually kind of the opposite of that which would be helpful - having the vertex normal data read in from an OBJ file (currently it is just skipped), and preserved along with the model.

When MoI writes an OBJ file, it writes vertex normals which come from the original NURBS surface, so they basically represent the ideal shading. When blender recalculates them, it does not have the original NURBS data available to it, it only has polygons.

- Michael

Blender is one program I just don't get. 3ds Max, I get (just barely), but when I open Blender I feel like a monkey trying to figure out a math problem. Hats off to anyone that does get it, they produce some really cool stuff and I am a little envious.

Blender is not that much harder to learn than a lot of other software once you know the GUI "philosphy", work through a few tutorials and you´ll quickly get the hang of it.

Actually, I don't use Blender for modeling, but I think too that GUI Blender is "non-conventional" but not difficult.

For me is like WordPerfect 5.1. When finally you learned all the keys and combinations, it was powerful and quiclky. (Ok....the 3 first months I wanted to fire to WP51 developers) :-)

I didn't know that Blender didn't import the OBJ files properly.

I remember that someone in the forum created a script for import the MoI models in LWO format, but I haven't try those script in Blender 2.5.

http://moi3d.com/forum/discussion.php?webtag=MOI&right=search

< I didn't know that Blender didn't import the OBJ files properly.
If there any problem just ask to developpers to make something for that!
maybe there
http://code.blender.org/index.php/about/

Hi David,

> I didn't know that Blender didn't import the OBJ files properly.

Yeah, it may not be something that you'd notice on certain models, because all the polygon faces do come in - it's the stored vertex normals that should be used for shading those polygons that don't come in.


> I remember that someone in the forum created a script
> for import the MoI models in LWO format, but I haven't
> try those script in Blender 2.5.

I did a quick try of them and they didn't seem to work anymore, I think the script API has changed.

Here is the original post on that:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=979.1

Also Anthony who did that Blender LWO import script has a custom build of an earlier version of Blender 2.5 here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3583.1

However, that build is pretty old now.

In addition to just importing the normals Blender also has a problem that it discards any existing vertex normals when you do a rendering or go into polygon edit mode, that has some bad side effects like not being able to edit UV coordinates without having the normals discarded and recalculated. That custom build avoids that.

- Michael

Hi Pilou,

> If there any problem just ask to developpers to make something
> for that! maybe there

Well, it seems that some of this behavior has already been reported as a bug.

For example here is a recent bug report that someone submitted about normals changing just when entering/exiting edit mode without doing anything else:
http://projects.blender.org/tracker/?group_id=9&atid=498&func=detail&aid=26405

Unfortunately the Blender dev says that they don't intend to fix it anytime soon and the bug report was rejected and closed.

- Michael

Yeah, Blender gave me a headache when I was trying to learn it :P

Ended up choosing Modo (mostly just for rendering, but also for smooth or organic shapes).

I'm just so glad I have MoI to model in <3

@Michael
Ok I will say that to a French guy who has some entry with the Blender Team and developpers ;)

Then, the best method for export is:

MoI-->export LWO-->Import LWO with Anthony's script in 2.49& save-->open *.blend file in 2.5

isn't it?

So with the lwo method, there is no problem of Normal?

Ah, I remember the times when Ton Rosendaal himself would bring his kid to the CeBit in Hannover, and drop by at our booth for a small CAD software (non-existent in today´s market) and you´d have time for a chat. Those were the days, already a powerful application.

Hi David,

> MoI-->export LWO-->Import LWO with Anthony's
> script in 2.49& save-->open *.blend file in 2.5
>
> isn't it?

Yeah, that would seem to be the only way to load the normals into 2.5 right now.

But unfortunately you'll still run into some problems if you then render, or try to edit UVs because both of those actions throw out any existing vertex normals and recalculate them by averaging polygon face normals.

So just loading them in is only part of the whole problem...

Blender just does not in general treat the vertex normals as an important channel of information that should be preserved when possible. I mean you do have to recalculate normals if you move some 3D vertex locations around, because you're then changing the shape of the model and it needs to be shaded differently to represent the new shape. But if you're just going to edit UV coordinates or do a rendering there is no reason to throw them out.

- Michael

There is not this problem with other progs like modo c4d ...?