Just got an email from Marmoset:

Now through New Year's Day all Marmoset software is 30% OFF

native modo, vray for modo, or octane for modo.

each has their own strengths. For quick and dirty renders, I use octane. For anything with more complicated materials, I use vray or modo

Just emailed Marmoset asking if they still had a sale going on (doesn't hurt to ask right?). It's 10:15 California time and they answered right away! Now that's great service. I missed the sale but will give the try-out a go for sure!

-Alan

Robert: I'm trying the demo of Toolbag2. How you handle not having a UV map from Moi? I'm finding that you need a UV map in order to apply textures.

THanks,
Alan

Maxwellrender

@ OSTexo: how / with what did you generate these raster shadings?

tnx
wim

Hello,

AI CS6, along Astute Graphics plugins Phantasm and Widthscribe2. I really prefer CorelDraw but they just don't have the plugin support of Adobe products, if they did I'd spend all of my time there. By the way those are actually full vector images including the background.

Hi Alan (Dooki),

One of the things I liked about Moi was it always generated good meshes that Toolbag2 took advantage of while texturing. Other apps I have used that are strictly modelers, like Moi, would only allow Marmoset to apply "smooth" textures like metals, whereas Moi allowed materials like Quixel Brick which has a lot of bumpy texture. Forgive me if I am stating the obvious here, but in Toolbag2 you can use some of the included shaders by using the little menu besides the "Duplicate" button in the upper right hand panel and selecting one (like Quixel Brick), then dragging it on to your model. For different textures in different parts of your model you need to have separate objects to apply the drag and drop shader to.

I haven't been using Moi that long but it has always worked in generating UV's. In my post #27 above, I use the following settings for creating an OBJ file:

Output=quads;
Display=shadedwithedges;
Weld=false;
Angle=3;
MaxLength=3;
MaxLengthApplyTo=curved;

Maybe other settings, (or other file types for that matter) for generating (.OBJ) Object files in Moi do not create the proper UV's. Michael would know about that.

HTH or maybe I am missing your problem, sorry.

Hi OSTexo,

Yes, its nice to be able to get a rendering converted to a vector graphic for a few reasons. I've seen images converted through Phantasm but have not actually tried it myself.

I'm curious now about using SVG with some images as an alternative to PNG for web use.

tnx @ OSTexo!

Thanks for the export as 3DS trick!

Are ther all explained renderengines are also good wit n-gons and tris? It's a lot of timeconsuming to made a retopology e.g. in 3DCOAT, but some renders are making fine renders also with tris/n-gons?

Only quad-polygons would be better, yes, but I think its only a must in organic models :) or? whats your opinion?!

Hi Lordfox,

> Only quad-polygons would be better, yes, but I think its only a must in organic models
> :) or? whats your opinion?!

As far as I know if you are only going to be rendering the model there is not any inherent advantage to having all quads. When you hear about needing to model with all quads it's because those quads are going to be used as a control cage for sub-d smoothing - that's when you do want to have all quads. When you're just going to be rendering a model directly and the model is not going to have sub-d smoothing applied to it and is not going to be animated in some bendy way there isn't any really any particular reason why all quads is better than any other kind of polygon structure...

Often times people have heard the "must have all quads" advice a lot because they are in a discussion forum where sub-d modeling is the primary thing that is happening to the polygons. When that's not happening (when it's just direct frozen non-sub-d smoothed polygons being rendered) the "all quads" advice basically becomes out of context.

> but some renders are making fine renders also with tris/n-gons?

All renderers that I am aware of with the exception of Blender can make 100% fine renders with just triangles. Blender is somewhat finicky since without some tweaks it does not support reading in the vertex normals smoothing information from OBJ files which is very important for making good quality renders from CAD data. N-gons are a little trickier, many programs have difficulty dealing with complex n-gons but Modo and Cinema4D have good support for them. If you are not using Modo or Cinema4D you may need to switch from "Output: N-gons" to "Output: Quads & Triangles" when saving out from MoI in order to avoid n-gon triangulation problems in your receiving rendering application.

If you are looking to have a nice render there is not any reason why you should need to do retopology, you would be doing retopology if you have some particular special needs separate from rendering like trying to hand optimize polygon count, trying to prepare a mesh for sub-d smoothing, or trying to prepare a mesh for bendy animation. Those are all special circumstances separate from just doing a render of your model.

- Michael

Just an update. About a year ago now, I forked out for KeyShot Pro. I actually bought Alibre Pro that came with the CAD version of KeyShot, but I soon tired of having to bring all models over to Alibre to get them into KeyShot. Hence going to the Pro version so I can bring in other file formats. Most of my work is from TurboCAD but I have a couple MoI models / KS renders, a couple SolidWorks model / KS renders and a few Alibre models / KS renders . If you are interested in seeing my KeyShot gallery have a look here: http://www.textualcreations.ca/Flash_Gallery_KeyShot/KeyShot_Gallery.html

The attached mouse was modeled in Moi and rendered in KeyShot. I used a top view to mimic a model and render I had seen by someone else that I really liked.

P.S. Although really costly, I can recommend KeyShot Pro as a possible render engine if you are looking for someway to render your MoI models.

Numerous models indeed and cornucopia site!

PS You can add to your list the fabulous TwinMotion 2019 &/ or 2020 as renderer and of course many other things! ;)
And piece of cake : that is free for personnal use is you have download it when Epic Games bought the original ! ;)
For commercial use it's (498$ / 2 ) till december 2021 ! ;)

Don -

+1 for Keyshot Pro (Although definitely not in the low cost category as some other programs mentioned in this thread.)

My workflow is MoI > Keyshot > Affinity Photo. I export EXR from Keyshot and Tone Map / Post Edit as 32 bit in Affinity.

Ed Ferguson