It appears that the Blender Foundation are developing a standalone Cycles render engine
using xml as the file format for input. It sill in its early stages but it looks promising.

I'm not a programmer but how hard would it be to write an exporter directly from MoI as
xml file that can read by the standalone Cycles? i.e export your MoI model as an xml file ?

Also it might solve the vertex normals issue by by-passing Blender...

Any thoughts?

Hi Carlo,

> I'm not a programmer but how hard would it be to write an exporter directly from MoI as
> xml file that can read by the standalone Cycles? i.e export your MoI model as an xml file ?

Do you mean it only supports that one format for importing data?

Usually it's very common for rendering programs to support a variety of commonly used formats (like OBJ format for example), that way they are able to consume data from various programs right away. Hopefully the standalone Cycles render engine will do that too. If it's not something that's in it right now maybe it's scheduled to happen a bit later?

- Michael

Hi Michael,

According to the developer, there may be obj/Alembic support down
the track ...

From Blenderartists.org ...

Originally Posted by DingTo
"Hey,
thanks for the suggestions, I will discuss this with Brecht a bit, but I think .obj is the right format for
now (and later maybe alembic). "

Carlo

Hi Carlo, that's good news! MoI does already support OBJ export so once they implement that, that should hopefully be a good way to bring models from MoI into Cycles.

- Michael

And with this OBJ format you can profit of the tones of tools of edition objects in Blender itself! :)