Hello everyone!
I made a folding knife, just for fun and excercise, inspired by the videogame Deus Ex. I modelled it in MoI, rendered in Blender, touched up in PS. I know nothing about knife design so it may not be technically correct.

I tried to import it to 3dCoat to make some experiments with texturing. I named every part in MoI and exported an obj file, but when I import it into 3D Coat it's one solid object, it didn't preserve the various parts. Any suggestion about this issue? Is it a MoI problem or a 3d Coat problem??

Use styles as material assigments on your named parts in MoI, then export.

I forgot to mention... I named the parts AND gave each one of them a style, but 3d Coat fails to recognize them anyway... :( I suspect it's a 3D Coat issue, I imported the obj file into Blender and it recognizes the different parts.

Nice looking knife and render.
cheers,
eric

Hi giai77, your knife looks great!

> I named every part in MoI and exported an obj file, but when I import it into 3D Coat it's one
> solid object, it didn't preserve the various parts. Any suggestion about this issue? Is it a MoI
> problem or a 3d Coat problem??

MoI does output object names in the .obj file, if 3d Coat isn't reading them that's something that would need to be tuned up in 3d Coat. You might look if there are some import settings that can be adjusted.

- Michael

Nice knife really like the form

How did you import the model? 3dcoat has many "rooms or ways to import for a purpose"...

Thank you everyone!!

@ Michael, I'm sure MoI exported the obj file correctly because Blender has no problem in seeing the different parts.

@ BurrMan, I tried with "Import Object", "Import Model for Voxelization" and "Import Model for Per Pixel Painting" (I noticed that sometimes there's one solid model in the sculpt room but the painting room preserves all the various parts).
This thing is puzzling me, it's not the first time I import a model from MoI to 3D Coat...

Export the different parts from MoI as *different* OBJs and import them in 3D Coat w/out voxelization.

Check out this video (start at 3:00) and it will show you how to properly voxelize your model.

Hi chippwalters!

Thank you very much for this very interesting tutorial on "pipeline" (or "workflow").

Very interesting.

Bye.

@ chippwalters Thank you man! Awesome tutorial as usual. I thought of exporting all the parts separately actually and I will do it eventually if I can't solve it any other way. It's an annoying process though, in particular for more complex models.

In your tutorial about the camera drone you imported the whole model into 3d Coat and it worked just fine. Is there a reason why you changed your workflow?

I changed it because I wanted to be able to quickly combine sets of objects in 3DC to be able to distress groups of models together.

In order to bake normals onto simpler geometry in Substance Painter, it's best to have a bake target for each material. So for a product like a knife which has two materials (a blade and a sheath), you would need two bake targets.

I don't know why you would want to voxelize your knife unless you wanted to add distress or create different bake sets.

The drone example didn't need baking, so I exported it as one object with separate meshes.

A quick test and I was able to successfully export 2 meshes at the same time into the Paint Room of 3DC and maintain their separate meshes:

@ chippwalters I'd like to import the knife model into 3DC to smooth some edges I can't fillet in MoI and to make some experiments with texturing. No problem, I'll export the different parts separately. Thank you for your help!! :D

This is one way of doing it.

https://www.cgtrader.com/profile/tutorials

@ keith1961 I can't open the page! :( (I think registration to the website is required to open it).

Hi Chipp .

Sorry to try to contact you via this forum

I read an article written by you recently and wished to ask you some questions about software

I can't find the thread.

I am reachable at eric@ericdesignstudio.ca

If you have the time and inclination please send me a contact method

thanks,
eric

In 3dC, during import object, select "W/O voxelization".... This will import separate named objects on their own layers... You can then voxelize layers 1 by 1 if you want voxels.... This is good too because you don't always want "4 million polys" to get detail on a box", like you may need for a blob of some sorts... Each object can have it's own poly count settings...

Hi Marco
Do you know why the Rocket forum has gone quiet? I want to know how to constrain extrude to 90 degrees but there seems to be nobody to ask.
Best wishes
Keith

@ BurrMan @keith1961 I hadn't checked "Import w/o voxelization" nor "Import to separate instances". I've just tried with another model and it works!! Thank you guys!!!