@michael : just a question
does exist in the futur a function "print" for have the exact outlines drawing of the volumes & intersections on paper?
Like a vectorial prog

Hi Will, Well generally it seems like MoI at $200 will already be less expensive than nearly all the Rhino plug-ins that I have seen. It's just easier for me to focus on one product right now, I don't really plan on doing a Rhino plug-in anytime soon.

Cinema4D / 3dm - They might only support reading polygon mesh data out of the .3dm file. This won't work with MoI since MoI stores only NURBS data in the .3dm file.

By far the preferred method for export to Cinema4D is by OBJ, that actually works extremely well. The final renders of the OBJ imports have NURBS level quality since the vertex normals from the actual NURBS surface are used to calculate the shading.

XSI / IGES - kind of the same story, use OBJ. XSI theoretically supports NURBS directly but it just is not an area that they have focused on for a long time, it is best to avoid that and use OBJ import again with the vertex normals enabled.

- Michael

Hi Pilou!

> does exist in the futur a function "print" for have the exact outlines drawing of
> the volumes & intersections on paper?
> Like a vectorial prog

Yes, definitely in the future. It will take a lot of work to make this fully functional though.

Eventually I would like to have a different "Print" viewport, as another tab next to Split / 3D / Top / Front / Right on the bottom bar, which would let you work in a printed page layout and place 3d views, etc...

That will be some more traditional "CAD" type functionality that I do want to add.


There will be one sort of first step for this with AI export which should be coming in the next beta after today (AI _import_ is ready for today though). But that will probably be pretty basic, we'll see...

- Michael

Thanks Michael, yes, I realize supporting Rhino isn't your goal.

My idea for your Rhino exporter would sort of be a "Polytrans" kinda thing, focused on polygons - which would be a huge undertaking in and of itself I certainly wouldn't expect that any time soon, if at all...

It was a humorous idea for me though, you plugging up their one main deficiency; polygon exports!

Looking forward to the next beta hopefully you're still on schedule for today!

-Will

PS - I saw mentioned over at Newtek where Cinema 4D's .3DM import doesn't show anything with nurbs or polys being in the 3dm file...

> Thanks Michael, yes, I realize supporting Rhino isn't your goal.

I guess it kind of is a goal in a certain sense... I do want to generally support using MoI in combination with other software including Rhino. In fact I generally recommend people to use Rhino to perform various functions that MoI does not currently do.

But yeah my focus is mostly on support through data import/export, not really in writing actual plug-in code for other systems.


> Looking forward to the next beta hopefully you're still on schedule for today!

I think so, just cleaning up some loose ends...

- Michael

LW users have asked/begged Newtek a zillion times to support vertex smoothing.
There was even a petition on the forum, which got deleted (more then 600 people signed).

Modo (which kinda replaced LW for me) is said to support it in the upcomming 301. (betatesters told me, it hasn't been confirmed yet by Luxology).
Cinema4d DOES suport vertex smoothing. Kerkythea, a free renderer does support it as well. So exported objs's look great in it as well.

Moi is Rock ! I love Moi !

moi - rhino - xsi

Yes, MOI and Rhino is a great combination - makes me glad about my Rhino purchase (investment) way back in the day! (Had hellava time trying to get my Rhino v1.1 upgraded to v2 on Vista last nite :-( Still can't get the final v2 update patch to install...)

I'm sorry to hear about that petition over at Newtek considering I posted a similar request earlier this week.

As I said, I'm not getting any younger waiting for LW to catch up with all these new generation apps and I see over at sharbor.com, there a competitive purchase deal for C4D XL...

Not that I want to spend another ~$1700 on a CAD app but if so, my LW would be up for sale that's for sure... I'm not willing to deal with workarounds while others are experiencing a smooth workflow (with up to date tools)...

I can hold off for now - MOI's lwo exports help a bit and I'm still evaluating C4D anyway...

-Will

Just got some Moi-obj-Modo 301 renderers.
Modo 301 does support vertex smoothing and it looks great.
(great tool for 'little' money)

btw. Ngon LWO to Modo works nice as well.

> Moi is Rock ! I love Moi !

I'm glad you like it! That's a beautiful smooth render.

- Michael

Hi Edwin,

> Modo 301 does support vertex smoothing and it looks great.

That's great! That will be a huge improvement for rendering CAD models.

The only problem is that currently there is nothing in the LWO spec for storing vertex normals inside of a LWO file, you will only currently get them in an OBJ export.

With their new version's support, they must have some kind of extension for the LWO format for storing normals in the LWO file. If I can find out the details of that format extension, then I could write the vertex normal data to LWO as well.

- Michael

Hello Michael,

this might be an interesting bit of information: The Lightwave exporter of Okino's PolyTrans offers the option to export vertex-normals in a "modo compliant way" as they call it. Here is how they describe it on the Okino website:


"Vertex Normals (Luxology MODO Compliant)

If this checkbox is enabled then vertex normals will be output to the .lwo object file. Vertex normals are needed to make an object appear smooth.

NOTE: at this time the Lightwave software does not have support for vertex normals in the .lwo file format; however, Luxology (developers of the MODO modeling program, and original developers of the Lightwave software) have implemented their own propietry "Vertex normals" chunk in the .lwo file. Okino has implemented this MODO compliant vertex normals chunk. The VMAP and VMAD type is "NORM" and the reference name is "vert_normals". Other software developers are free to add support for this added vertex normals IFF chunk in their Lightwave importers.

This option will be disabled when the Lightwave v5.6 file format version is selected."

(http://www.okino.com/conv/exp_lw.htm)

Cool, hopefully Michael will be able to use this info for MOI - sounds like another checkbox is gonna be needed somewhere (or perhaps just an additional "LWO2" format specifier in the dropdown list...)

-Will

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