Just on a side note.

None of these files caused any problems when rendering in LightWave

cheers

M.W.

the sphere test performed well in Modo over here also...
jonah

Just confirming that lwo_normals_test4 works for me too!
The new beta hasn't got these changes in though, as far as I can tell. I get the same as Schbeurd's Normal Test 1 image still.
This must mean the final release is imminent!! :)

> The new beta hasn't got these changes in though, as far as I
> can tell. I get the same as Schbeurd's Normal Test 1 image still.

Yeah, it doesn't have it yet, I'm planning on another new one today that will fix it up.

It should be nice when this is working right, having the correct normals will prevent little shading irregularities that can happen when trying to calculate the normals just from polygon faces alone.


> This must mean the final release is imminent!! :)

Yup, the software is pretty much wrapped up, just need to fix a few last bugs here... Then the only thing left is documentation which will take a little bit of time to complete.

- Michael

Ok, finally got to the bottom of this lwo normals issue.

Regularly a LWO file has x,y,z coordinates specified in a left-handed coordinate system.

Just to make things interesting I guess, Modo decided to have vertex normal coordinates specified in a right-handed coordinate system instead.

Now that I've got that set up, things are working great with Modo 203 - accurate vertex normals are coming through and that makes for noticeably smoother shading. Shading artifacts are basically eliminated.

I need to check out a few other things, later today I should be able to make another new beta with this fix in it.


One additional note - if you want to edit the LWO mesh in Modo by yanking some points around, etc, you'll probably need to find some way to strip out the vertex normals. They're stored with labels like "vert_normals1", "vert_normals2", somewhere in the Modo UI these should show up. Modo does not seem to update these normals automatically when you move the geometry around, so the shading stays kind of locked in to its initial look despite how you drag points around. This is probably something that should be fixed in Modo to be handled more automatically.

- Michael

I'm going to postpone the new beta with this LWO normal fix until tomorrow afternoon so I can add some additional diagnostic stuff to try and help track down these script errors.

So slight delay, but not long...

- Michael

No problem, I understand that definitely needs priority.
I saw the same script errors when a colleague installed moi and tried to play with it though it never happened to me! He had antivirus software and was using IE7 by the way...

A quick note - Modo 203 doesn't seem to properly handle any type of editing operation on a mesh with vertex normals, even flipping.

It will just flip the face orientations but the vertex normals will remain unaltered, this will cause shading problems with the face and vertex normals pointing in opposite directions.

If you export a closed solid from MoI, MoI will do some work to automatically orient normals towards the "outside" direction of the solid. But if you export open surfaces, there won't be any automatic orientation. Due to the Modo flipping bug, you won't be able to flip it properly in Modo so to render it properly you will need to turn on double-sided rendering for the render material.

I think I will tune this up so that open meshes will get a double-sided material set on them by default on export from MoI.

I still haven't seen if there is a way in Modo 203 to throw out vertex normals and return to auto-generated ones... If that was possible that would also fix the problem but at the cost of returning to less smooth shading.

- Michael

Well I have to thank you for tuning that up, my .lwo exports look super smooth now!!
(don't worry I will upload some examples soon....)

Thats unfortunate about Modo's normal handling.. I haven't had any flipped meshes yet. I hope Lux are aware of these issues? They seem to take a healthy interest in bug reports at least, but maybe not up to your standards Michael!

Great Rhumba, I'm glad the fix is working for you. I'd love to see some examples!

> I hope Lux are aware of these issues?

I don't know... It would probably be a good idea to report them if you are able to.

The flipping for instance should be an easy thing to fix.

I guess they just haven't got very much test data in with the normals included yet.

- Michael