Hoi, Hi.
I was organizing a drawing. Is it better to create layers by using object names or styles?
That's all, stupid question maybe.
Thanks,
M.

Hi Max - it's up to your own personal preference, one way is not particularly inherently the "best" way.

When you use styles they can be organized by color so that the objects are visually distinct on the screen.

For tagging just one single object that you want to refer back to later on, that can be convenient to do by assigning a name.

You can use both styles and name assignments in combination with one another too, it doesn't necessarily have to be all one or all the other.

Styles generally map more closely to what other programs usually call "layers" though.

When you export to a 3D rendering program using OBJ or LWO formats, the style assignments will become material assignments in the mesh file. So if you want to have materials be assigned when exporting to a rendering program like that use styles for that.

- Michael

That's exactly the type of answer I needed. Thank you very much.

I agree
Thanks for the question and also the answer very clearly

When exporting to OBJ, how is the order of styles assignments in Moi converted into material assignments and polygon selection tags in the OBJ file? I have a number of STEP models that I want to convert and would like each model to not only have style assignments the same, but also the polygon selection tag number the same. When I export two different models now, surfaces that have the "Red" style assigned in Moi import into C4D with the "Red" material tag assigned, but the polygon selection tag might be "Selection 1" for one model and "Selection 2" for the other.

There seems to be no relationship of this process to the order of the styles as listed in MoI. The tags don't seem to be assigned in alphabetical order either.

Thanks for your help!

-Randy

Hi Randy, the order of the styles list in MoI will be preserved in the materials list in the companion .mtl file that is generated alongside the .obj file.

Inside the .obj file, faces are gathered into smoothing group chunks and there isn't any style related ordering to the faces list, faces just reference materials and if you need an ordering to the material you would need to find it in the .mtl file to find its original order in MoI. However only styles that are actually being used will be emitted to the .mtl file so to replicate the MoI style index values exactly you would need to eliminate unused styles before doing the export.


> <...> polygon selection tags in the OBJ file?

As far as I know there isn't anything in OBJ files called a "selection tag", there is an "object name" and a "group name", do you mean one of those?

There is also an option in moi.ini to use the style name as the group name for the object, that probably won't help you deal with ordering but I just wanted to mention it in case it's useful:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=5790.2


Hope this helps!

- Michael

Looks like Cinema4D wasn't utilizing the .mtl file when importing. I imported it using the Riptide plug-in and it did utilize the .mtl file. Now materials and selection tags in C4D are both named the same as the original style in Moi. Perfect!

Thanks for your help, Michael!

-Randy

Randy,

there is also a python script for importing .mtl files in case you don't want to use riptide.

you can find it here http://c4d-jack.de/site/en/downloads/cat_view/82-python-skripte.html
it's called mtl-import... :)