Hi cronbg - thanks for passing this along, this is a useful bit of information on how to get stuff into the next version of Modo better.

I've added this data to MoI's LWO export for the next beta release, which I'm hoping to put out tomorrow.

I don't really have any way to test it to make sure it works though, because only Modo version 301 is supposed to support this and I don't have that over here. But in that version, this data should make a pretty nice difference for improving the smoothness of shading.


@Will - Actually I don't think that a checkbox will be needed for this, MoI is already saving out LWO2 style files (which still end with .lwo, they are an updated version of LWO that doesn't have the 65536 points-per-object limitation that the original LWO had). One thing that is nice about LWO files is that they are structured in such a way that programs can easily skip chunks of data that they don't recognize. So other programs that don't know how to process vertex normals should just skip right over them.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

wow, thank you so much, this is really cool!
I can't wait to get my hands on modo 301 to see how it works. This will work wonders for industrial designers like me who have to deal with a lot of NURBS and parametric solids but need high quality meshes for virtual product shots.

I think with MoI's excellent NURBS to polygon conversion capabilities, you have a real gem on your hands.

Okay great Michael, not knowing details on the LWO format, I didn't realize it was based around chunks similar to tiffs...

Glad to hear it wasn't hard for you to get this into the next beta!

Even though I've sorta settled with using Cinema 4D now (thanks to all of you folks here ;-) ), I will certainly appreciate the effort when Newtek finally gets their act a bit further into this century!

-Will