I’d say that the 2 biggest tips I could give would be
1 – Make sure surfaces are joined together before exporting. Often times IGES files will have models decomposed into individual surfaces instead of connected-together solids. You can tell this if just one piece of a model selects when you click on it the first time in MoI, normally on a solid the first click will select the whole solid and only the second click would select one sub-surface of the solid.
So if you’ve got individual surfaces, select them all and use Edit/Join in MoI first before exporting them.
MoI does extra work to make sure that the mesh vertices align on shared edges between joined surfaces. If surfaces are not joined, they get processed separately and this can result in slightly different mesh structures being created there leading to slight cracks.
Also if things are joined together MoI will make sure that all the joined-together pieces are output with a consistent normal direction. If you have separate surfaces you can get different normals between each piece when you export.
That’s definitely the biggest thing.
#2 – I’d recommend using OBJ format instead of STL. STL is a very bare-bones format that only contains triangles and nothing else at all. OBJ contains some other information it, the most interesting begin vertex normals. These are normals that are used for smooth shading and the normals come from the original NURBS surface model making them nice and accurate. When you try to import polygon data to a polygon program, it will still try to cook up vertex normals to make a smooth shaded look, but it will do it by trying to average the normals of nearby polygon faces. This is just an approximation of smoothing and it tends to cause shading glitches, especially when polygons of different size are adjacent to one another. Getting the accurate normals really helps get better quality shading.
Other than that, I don’t think I have any real general advice, there may be certain kinds of tweaks on the advanced settings that can help for particular situations, but it tends to be specific to more limited situations and particular models instead of just totally general purpose advice.
If you have models that are causing difficulty, please send them to me if that is possible so I can repeat the problem over here and possibly track down any bugs or give you more specific advice.
Hope this helps!
- Michael
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