Hi, I've been building a model using MOI but at some point it seems that the model has been shattered into lots of individual objects. It's hard to tell in MOI but when I exported it as an FBX you can see the issues I have. Is there any way to rectify these issues directly in MOI without having to take the mesh into another 3d editing program. Some kind of normalize faces option?

I know about the flip faces button but it's pretty useless if I can't see which way faces are pointing inside MOI (useful for one or two faces but not this many.) How would I combine the object so it's a single solid unit? It seems that now it's broken into parts boolean etc does nothing...in addition, using 'join' doesn't seem to help either.

I just want the model back into to a single unit with all the faces pointing outward. Hopefully someone can assist.




The model inside MOI


Arghh! Look at this mess!


The model in my engine.

Hi Simon, I've sent you a reply through e-mail but I'll post it here too:

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Hi Simon, usually the best way to ensure faces are pointed outwards is to make your object into a fully closed solid – that will automatically orient face towards the outside of the solid volume.

When you only have an open surface object and not a completely closed volume, it’s fairly arbitrary which direction will be taken as the positive one. Right now there isn’t really any way in MoI to visualize which side is the positive side, mainly because it’s not really significant in MoI itself. In the future I do want to add in a way to shade back faces as red or something like that to help with this, but currently there isn’t anything like that. In the past I’ve mostly assumed that if the positive facing direction is significant in some other environment where you’re taking the mesh into, that there ought to be some way to flip the direction in that environment itself, but sadly this does not seem to always be the case.


> in addition, using 'join' doesn't seem to help either.

Normally Join should help a lot, if you joined all the pieces together and it formed a solid it would solve the problem right there, but also joined pieces will have a single consistent positive side to the entire joined structure and that can make it easier to run the flip command on large pieces rather than on individual pieces.

If Join won’t do anything at all then it possibly means the pieces have too large gaps in between them, or in a worse case if you have somehow duplicated all of your surfaces (like by copy+paste an extra time) and you have surfaces joined to their own duplicated copy that has to be separated out and have the duplicates removed before you’ll be able to get it to join properly.

If you’re still having problems with Join can you possibly send me the model file so I can examine it and give you better advice?

- Michael