If you only have Carrara and only want to render the model, you can save it as a sat or a step and use Carrara's meshing parameters to get a nice result. If you want to first create the OBJ's, then MoI's mesher will be much better, but as mentioned, Carrara has done something with the OBJ importer....

Hi everyone
Thanks for being so helpful. I learned more today than I would in weeks of trawling as when I do a search its just chance that some answered my question in the past. I used SimLab and all the things I have discarded look a lot better than I thought possible, and where there are problems I can understand why; in most cases at least.

Chipp the stuff you posted really helped too and has given me some perspective. A lot of you who have spent a career doing this stuff amaze me because you know and do things I don't even know are possible.

BurrMan, I stumbled across people talking about Daz turning towards selling assets and no longer supporting Carrara, which if true makes me sad. It does a huge amount of stuff but the renders I can produce (that looked cool to me when I started) are poor compared to the ones regularly posted here. When Michael told me about the problems with smoothing I upgraded to 8.5 and found the import of 3dm to be present but had no better smoothing than the standard version. I assume that there are more people who want and are able to pose girls in bikinis with hefty swords than people who want to make models. My guess is that Cararra is going to be just another way of posing genesis and 89.7 smoothing (or whatever it is) works best.

To be honest I'm well into uninformed speculation now so will leave you all in peace until my next ill informed venture causes me difficulty.
Many thanks
Keith

Hi Kieth,
So just a couple last additions here, since it can help you with the NURBS and Poly's differences you are discussing.

(And my comments will be in regard to the NURBS we are starting with in MoI)

Most importantly, when you are bringing in you model to a poly/rendering application, anything you see referencing "Smoothing", will be throwing out what Michael referred to about "Vertex Normals"... (These are very important to your CAD (NURBS) model going into these other arenas ) If they are not being read in, then that will self destruct your CAD data.

""""""""""It does a huge amount of stuff but the renders I can produce (that looked cool to me when I started) are poor compared to the ones regularly posted here""""""""

Well, remember you are looking at people very skilled at doing that..... Some of the renders you see in the MoI Gallery are from "Carrara"...... Simlab is a great choice though, like some of the others. They are geared towards creating great looking renderings with very little input. But you sacrifice from some of the other programs like Carrara, which allow you to have control very deep into the render.... (I keep mentioning Carrara because you mentioned it. Like you have noted, the development is not really going to keep up. Something like Modo would be far superior....)
But having very deep control of the render can be not so good for someone starting out... If you don't set all those parameters well, then the render will suffer.

You mentioned earlier about a guy's challenge to "show your polygon" or something like that... The simple answer is we don't have "polygons" in NURBS, but we can create them from our NURBS objects.

Thanks BurrMan
I get what you say, I hope. I like nurbs but coming at it from an uninformed direction did not really understand why there were several types of modeling. You have all helped m understand something that to most people is very specialist knowledge. I have HUGE respect for you all and have been trying to explain to my wife, a psychologist, how you all make things out of maths, points and lines. I think she humors me:)
Keith

Hi Keith1961 from Mauro(1962) :)
talking about Moi mesher to obtain a good export it depend also what tools you use
let me show few example,pictures talks better than my english ;)

an egg shape obtained first with a revolve,then from solid, extracted isocurves for loft and add two points at the poles





now exporting you can see little differences between them, a better sudbivision for loft at the pole area




now a wavy surface using same extracting method:sweep and network




again little differences, better regular subdivision on the network




the egg should be done obviously using revolve but if you don't need an accurate shape,it can be done using loft because of better subdivision at the poles
it's better to export with the good foot before render ;)

M

Hi Mauro - yes the different UV surface structure of different construction mechanisms can have an effect on meshing.

But the differences you show there are very minimal - the one for Sweep versus Network probably has more to do with using the "aspect ratio limit" parameter - it's just a matter of luck that the sweep is very slightly shorter in length (as traveled along the surface because of slightly different shaping) than the Network and so the polygons near the border are just under that limit while the Network one are just very slightly over it. If you change that parameter slightly to different values like 1.8, 1.9, 2.1, 2.2, etc... you should be able to arrive at the same result for either one of those surfaces. I rarely use the aspect ratio limit myself, usually the distance-based "Divide larger than" parameter has a more uniform effect.

For the Revolve versus Loft, there will can be slight differences depending on the control point spacing on your revolve profile versus the spacing of the sections for the Loft.

I would recommend not really worrying so much about these kinds of very minimal differences - if you need that extreme level of control over the polygon output like more polygons in just one single spot and not in other areas, you are probably better off building the entire shape in a polygon modeler from the beginning rather than generating polygons through any automatic process at all...

For normal use, if you don't have enough polygons in a particular area like the pole, just move the angle slider towards the "more polygons" side until you have enough, just don't worry so much about having a few more in other areas as well. If you have shallow curvature then the slider alone may not give enough detail since it's based on curvature - to make shallowly curved areas to have a higher density use the "Divide larger than" option as well to break down any large polygons to a more uniform size.

If you want to post your 3DM model files for those cases, I can try to show what mesh settings to use to get good output for each of those cases that will look exactly the same as each other when rendered.

- Michael

Hi Michael
This was just a "side note"..showing this example we expand the knowledge of Moi thanks to your explanation,like in other situations.
Sorry i didn't save the file but agree with you about rendered result.

M