As a Moi3d-Modo user i'm anxious to try this new release from Luxology.
It is said to support vertex normal smoothing which means rendering Moi3d objects in Modo SHOULD give us smooth surfaces.
If only the download was faster (20kb at the moment) :-)
I'll post some renders when availible.

That's great Edwin, please let me know how it works!

It turned out that Modo 203 actually did support vertex normals in some particular situations as well - back a few betas ago I was able to figure out how to write vertex normals to LWO in the format that Modo 203 understood, which did help with much smoother renderings.

Hopefully that same method is compatible with Modo 301 as well.

- Michael

yup yup yup... I'm 85% downloaded now. Can't wait to have this vertex normal smoothing working to full effect. I've been having some render troubles with imported CAD meshes and this will really help...

jonah

GOOD NEWS FOR MOI USERS

Coming soon! New SketchUp importer and a Rhino 3dm file translator.

Wat, Sketchup+MoiOpenNurbs ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

<New SketchUp importer and a Rhino 3dm file translator
Where we can see that?

http://www.luxology.com/whatismodo/markets_productdesign.aspx

bottom of the page

what do you think, is it gonna work with MOI

> what do you think, is it gonna work with MOI

I don't think so - from what I heard it only reads polygon mesh data out of a .3dm file. MoI only puts NURBS data into a .3dm file, not any polygon mesh data...

Also polygon meshes inside of .3dm files are limited to triangle or quad faces, the format doesn't support N-gons.

So unless it is a lot different than I expect, you'll probably still want to use LWO for export from MoI to Modo.

- Michael

that's great news if you don't own Rhino or Moi. If you do, i think it's not necessary to have this... Even if this importer bring in all Rhino lights, textures, environment from Rhino, i still find it faster and easier to just setup a render in Modo. Modo makes it sooooooo easy...

jonah

Modo 203 was indeed able to import vertex normals, but failed to handle them properly when you did subsequent transformations on the imported geometry. For example, when parts were mirrored, it seemingly did not apply that transformation to the vertex normals, which resulted in shading errors on the mirrored polygons (like if the light would come from the opposite direction).
From what I've seen so far, Modo 301 does handle this correctly now.
(However I didn't try it on more complex transformations like i.e. morph maps yet.)

Wings3D all the way :)