Hi Michael,
I would like to know if it would be possible
to add ".fact" format support for export?
I use Electric Image for a lot of my rendering and
now that I have been using MOI for a while I would like
to go directly from MOI to EI....
thanks
Mike Fitz
www.3dartz.com

Hi Mike, I won't be able to add this for version 1.0 since I've got that pretty much wrapped up.

In general I've been trying to focus mostly on just the OBJ export - OBJ is a really flexible format and contains pretty much all the information that is possible to store in polygon files, it supports UV coordinates, N-Gon polygons, Vertex normals for smooth shading, smoothing groups, ...

Would there be any advantage to using FACT file format over OBJ? I mean is there something contained in a FACT file that you can't find in an OBJ file?

I poked around a little bit on the EI web site but I couldn't find a technical description of the FACT file format, do you know if one is available?

- Michael

Michael,
thank you for the reply.

I'm on it. Will contact the EI people reguarding the tech desc.

Mike

Hi Michael,
Matt Hoffman from EI sent me the link for the plug-in kit.

http://www.eitechnologygroup.com/downloads/updates/eias/66/PluginKit66.zip

I would like this because, primarily I'm having a hard time getting a good export
via obj or 3ds formats.

the EI community is still mourning the loss of EI modeler, which was
a solids cad style and I know that they would jump on this with a lot
of enthusiasm.

thanks for the time!

Mike Fitz
www.3dartz.com

Hi Mike, looking through the FACT documentation, it appears to want triangle and quad type polygon data to render. So you may get better results in your OBJ export if you switch from Output: N-gons to Output: Quads & Triangles, or possibly even Output: Triangles only.

Can you please check and see if that improves your data transfer using OBJ format?

- Michael

Hi Michael,
Yes I will try outputting as you suggest.
I will post my results as soon as I can run a test.
thanks!

Mike

Hey Michael,
I have tried every which way with triangles and quads and triangles only...
they export only slightly better.
the main problems are happening arond edges, where the surface is
ruff and when rendered, artifacts show up.

Would posting a picture be of any help?

Mike

Hi Mike, an image would be good.

From what I can tell from your description, it sounds like EI is not making use of the vertex normal shading information that is present in the OBJ file.

When that shading information is not used, shading will be calculated by just averaging the normals of nearby polygons which is not as accurate as using the vertex normals in the file which come from the original NURBS surface.

When I looked through the FACT file format stuff, it seemed like it had some entries in it for having vertex normals, so I would assume that EI supports vertex normals in its regular operation. I'm not sure why they wouldn't read them in from the OBJ file though...

Actually, I have one idea... One additional thing to try - when you export the OBJ file, expand the little arrow in the lower-left corner of the mesh dialog and un-check "Weld vertices along edges".

EI may be getting confused because they might not support faces that share the same 3D vertices between one another but have unique UV and vertex normals. By turning welding off it prevents this kind of partial sharing between faces, that may work better.


Hmmm.. yeah looking through the FACT docs again, it appears that the vertex normals that EI uses are only specified per-vertex, they aren't specified per-face. So turning welding off should probably help.

- Michael

Hey Michael,
Okay, I spent the morning doing some tests based on what you wrote above.
I have successfully imported the model into EI with no surfacing artifacts!
Nice!

You were correct in suggesting that EI was lookign for quads and traingles only.
But I had to run it through "transporter", which converts files to .fact files. I had been doing
that the whole time but, I had to deactivate all the shading and angle settings to off
in order to get a successful import.... don't know why that worked but it did.
The N-gons did not work with any combination of settings I tried.

So I certainly can start using MOI with my EI projects, but still think
direct "fact" support would be great, and would attract many EI users
to the software.

Thanks for the help Michael,

Mike Fitz
www.3dartz.com

I'm going to try and get some time to set up a fancy render of
this model I just whipped up for my EI tests.

I'm really happy with the fillets tool ability to handle tight corners now!
Nice
Mike Fitz
www.3dartz.com

Hi Mike, that's great!

So let me verify for future reference in case others ask me this question -

you need to switch to Quads & Triangles output, and then did you also need to turn off welding when exporting from MoI ?

Then when using the EI converter, turn off shading and angle settings so that it will use the shading information stored in the OBJ file instead of creating its own shading from averaging the polygon data.

Is that correct?


Basically once you have set OBJ output to Quads & Triangles and turn welding off, that puts the exact same information into the OBJ file as what I would write into a FACT file.

Then the question I would have is why does EI make you jump through some extra hoops with a separate converter and with turning off settings for shading, instead of using the good shading from the file by default?

If they would have built-in support for reading OBJ, and also default to using the good shading information ("vertex normals") that are stored in the OBJ file, that would streamline this process and make EI read OBJ files just as easily as it reads FACT files... At least that's what it sounds like to me.

Is there any chance they might tune up these procedures on their end to make EI more friendly to OBJ format? OBJ format is now pretty much the most common format used for data exchange, so it makes things a lot easier for everyone when a program has good support for a commonly used file format like this. It's just a lot easier for me to focus my attention on a smaller number of more commonly used file formats than to try and develop a whole bunch of different specialized formats. File format work just tends to be really pretty finicky and requires quite a lot of testing from my end to make sure that it is working correctly, so each one that I try and tackle is a pretty big investment of time...

- Michael

Hey Michael,
yes you are correct.
the only specific is that I got great results with
either triangles only or quads and triangles.

With Welding on, the imported obj to the converter "transporter" comes in spikey.

With Welding off, the imported obj to Transporter comes in clean and smooth and
is saved to fact format which comes into EI clean and smooth.
All surfacing settings were deactivited in Transporter, then save as fact.

Mike

Here is a screen cap from EI.