If I correctly understand what is said in the weekly modcast on Luxology forum, there's currently a "3DM translator" under development. This plugin (99$ ?) will permit to Import and Export tesselated data from 3DM files into Modo.

For those interested, here's the link to the thread (please correct me if i misunderstood something) :

http://forums.luxology.com/discussion/topic.aspx?id=18878

And here the direct link to the modcast (QuickTime required)

http://content.luxology.com/modo/301/modcasts/Aug10-2007.m4a (the info is almost at the middle of the modcast)

They mention Rhino, but I imagine that it will work with MoI files as well... Maybe the end of the "problems" for importing MoI data into Modo ??? ;-)

I have just been listening to that modcast too and while it generally sounds nice to be able to read *.3dm files directly into modo, I still think I wouldn't really want to go that way for reading rhino files -- just because tesselated rhino-data is pretty much exactly what you would not want to have to deal with in modo (complete triangle-mess in my experience).
I think I would still stick with using moI as a translator (via *.lwo, which is working absolutely great since the latest beta, even with the current modo203), simply because the meshes it generates when exporting polygonal geometry (mainly quads and n-gons) are far superior to everything that you will find in a native *.3dm file coming out of rhino.

Hi. I've been really interesting to learn about this myself. Unless they've built their own n-gon mesher, then i don't see how it will be of much advantage over using Moi's export...

jonah

You guys are right. If it just converts 3DM data into triangles it's not interesting.
I just hope that for 99 USD, it will be a bit more than that ! ;-)
Anyway, I will keep an eye on this until I exactly know what this plugin is capable of...

I listened to it, and it's not quite completely clear but probably the description of reading "tessellated data" from the .3dm file means only sucking out already existing mesh data from the file. Meshes in a .3dm file (either attached as a render mesh to a NURBS object, or as an independent mesh object) can only contain triangles or quads.

MoI does not store any kind of polygon mesh data in a .3dm file, only NURBS data. So if they skip all the NURBS data, it won't do any good with MoI-generated .3dm files.

For Rhino .3dm files, I guess there may be some kind of convenience factor, but functionally your end result would be the same thing as exporting .lwo from Rhino.

So I wouldn't get your hopes up too much....

- Michael

Hi Jonah,

> Unless they've built their own n-gon mesher, <...>

Which is really pretty unlikely, although not entirely impossible I suppose.

Meshing is a particularly finicky and delicate area, it just isn't something that is feasible to crunch out very quickly.

- Michael

Hey ! Look who is back from Siggraph ! ;-)

Thanks for the precisions Michael. As your current LWO exporter works great, it was just another solution that I wanted to report. Actually, I don't really want to spend that money on a plugin... ;-)

if this importer was a "real" plugin that was able to support Nurbs objects in Modo and could utilize an adjustable render mesh, then it would be very good indeed. Or if it could run Modo (with updatable 3DM link) as a plug-in render engine for 3DM would be great too (especially for Rhino, as Moi does not have any render setup tools). But if it only offers basic importing of 3DM to Modo, then I only see it being useful for animating / rendering studios who don't own a license of Rhino or Moi, but whose clients might send them 3DM files. And honestly i don't see any design firms sharing their original 3DM's. Carrara 5 Pro was also able to import 3DM files directly, but i always found the mesh results were pretty crappy. And large file imports (typical for complex mechanical assemblies) would crash Carrara or take a very long time to import... Luxology should have built the 3DM importer themselves because 3DM is such a hugely recognized format. It should be standard in Modo...

Michael, at this moment i am happy with Moi's mesher for handling single objects. But there's still a few things which would greatly improve it:

**UV nesting option (as Rhino does for OBJ export)
**support for mesh objects in Moi (n-gon of course), so we can mesh objects one by one and export all in one LWO file.
**layer system, and an option to sort objects by name, layer, grouping, etc when exporting
**limiting n-gons to specific faces by clicking on them while meshing

jonah