> Tomorrow can you please post a screenshot showing some of the faces that are in the wrong direction? I'd like to closely inspect those areas to see if I can figure out what might be happening there.

Here we go. I've added comments directly in the images (I'm a bit lazy) ;-)

(Edit : forgot to mention that between image 7 and 8 polys were "manually" flipped. Can be quite tedious in Modo with an object made out of multiple parts which is why I prefer to merge the vertices)

Cya

Schbeurd

Uhm, I've been away for a while, and am not sure if this has been brought up before. One sugestion for making the polygon export tool more flexible would be adding sliders for minimum and maximum egde lengths. this would make it easier to avoid the worst of "sliver" polygons.

There's something wrong with the front wheel and front fender, so it might be a good test.

This was the first thing I ever made in 3d (rhino).

> chaos-bike.zip

Hi Bill, thanks for the test model. Here is what it looks like with the current ngon mesher:



The .obj model is a bit large so I'm not posting that right now. I'm hoping to put together a version with this new mesher pretty soon.

- Michael

This is a really cool project. I thought I would bring a quote in from one of the Lux developers so you could read it. "It looks like an interesting project. The developer still seems to be tweaking the exporter, so there doesn't seem to be a link to the latst test cannon .obj. One thing I would suggest to the programmer is to use the .obj 'o' directive to define different object layers. Many obj exporters use breaks in the vertex lines to define layers, but importers that rely on this will not play well with Sketchup export, as you may remember." -Arnie Cachelin

>> ...I thought I would bring a quote in from one of the Lux developers so you could read it...

Is this a thread on Luxology forum ? If yes, can you provide a link ?
Thanks

> Is this a thread on Luxology forum ? If yes, can you provide a link ?

http://forums.luxology.com/discussion/topic.aspx?id=12649

> "It looks like an interesting project. The developer still seems to be tweaking
> the exporter, so there doesn't seem to be a link to the latst test cannon .obj.
> One thing I would suggest to the programmer is to use the .obj 'o' directive
> to define different object layers.

Right now I'm using the 'g' directive to differentiate between different objects.

I'm kind of uncertain whether it is better to use 'g' or 'o' for this... I may need to look at a couple of simple .obj files that contain multiple objects (like 2 cubes) from a few programs to see what is the most common method. But I guess I could put in both 'g' and 'o', that might be the safest...

The exporter is still in the process of being tweaked. I should be ready to release an early version within a couple of days.

Previous versions have had ngons that have some of their points bunched pretty close together, or even duplicated. It seems like this is an area that Modo is particularly sensitive about. Silo and C4D seem to do a better job of either handling or ignoring these. I am currently in the process of improving this though.

But there do seem to be some other problems in Modo as well - it seems as if problems with a particular polygon can then trigger problems with other more simple ones after it. There are a couple of messages way back in this thread where I examined a simple (I think 5-point) polygon that was messed up (along with other more complex ones) when trying to bring in the full mesh, but it was handled ok when it was brought in by itself.

The last test file that I posted had some progress on removing duplicate points, and modo seemed to handle this version a lot better, so I hope that with my final remaining tweaks that also improve point spacing, it should help out a lot too.

- Michael

Thanks Michael !

Seems you're everywhere, just like Frenchy Pilou ! ;-)
Very recent thread on Luxo forum. I'm gonna see if I can contribute to the topic there...
Cya

>The .obj model is a bit large so I'm not posting that right now. I'm hoping to put together a version with this new mesher pretty soon.

It's good that it didn't have problems. Roland's Modela 4 crashed on the .stl generated by rhino repeatedly, and when I was testing the rib generated by rhino in gelato there were weird artifacts around the front fender.

Just want to say thanks Schbeurd and RazorX for helping me get my post on the Lux site related back to this site and your participation on both.

I really hope Lux listens and works Modo into handling the CAD side of things more. I see this part of the industry becoming HUGE over the next few years and I Would really like to use Modo in my pipeline.

Also, Michael your program is excellent thus far and although still in beta, it's exporter is probably the best I have seen so far when it comes to ease of use and results. Hell, actually the whole program is kick ass so far.

Thanks

> Also, Michael your program is excellent thus far and although still in
> beta, it's exporter is probably the best I have seen so far when it
> comes to ease of use and results.

Thanks Slayer, I'm glad the exporter is working well for you.

The next version coming up in a couple of days has a huge overhaul to this area though, it completely blows away the current beta version.

So if you like the current version's exporter, I think you will really, really like the next one.

It's more than just full ngon support, with the new exporter you also have a lot more fine tuned control over the output. The output grows very incrementally in density so you can move the slider up just a little bit to smooth things out in small steps. The current beta has a problem in this area, where things kind of come in big steps, and if you want just a little bit more density sometimes you have to go until things get doubled everywhere. This is not really a problem with the new one.

So far it appears that the only negative thing about the new one is that it is a pretty heavy number cruncher, I think it is a bit slower than the current one. I'm not too focused on that though, for exporting it is not too terrible if you have to wait 30 seconds or something, if you can get really high quality results.

- Michael

I should mention that the one coming in a couple of days still isn't going to be completely finished, it will have ngons that have their vertices all arranged properly, but it won't have automatic welding yet, you'll still need to a weld or merge vertices or whatever your particular program calls it. Doing this automatically will be coming along afterwards.

- Michael

This is awesome news and I look forward to playing/testing with it. I hope the fixes help some of the issues with Modo, but sadly I think the changes will need to come from their end.

Thanks

> but sadly I think the changes will need to come from their end.

Yes, this is probably true. If they don't have the type of mesh structure where two adjacent faces can share the same vertex, but let each face have its own unique vertex normal, then that's going to prevent it from being able to read in .obj files in their full fidelity. MoI won't produce .obj files with this type of structure quite yet, but it will once the next phase of handling the welding is done.

But there is still some additional stuff that I can do that might help - I can also define smoothing groups inside the .obj file, and if they process those then I can probably get it set up a lot better than when you try to do a merge with break angles.

- Michael

>So far it appears that the only negative thing about the new one is that it is a pretty heavy number cruncher, I think it is a bit slower than the current one.

Can you run that sort of calculation through the GPU? :-)

> Can you run that sort of calculation through the GPU? :-)

It's theoretically possible, but it would be quite enormously difficult to regear it all to do that.

- Michael

> Just want to say thanks Schbeurd and RazorX for helping me get my post on the Lux site related back to this site and your participation on both.

You're welcome ! ;-)
I'm still a Modo newbie but I'm planning to use it more and more in the future. The same applies for MoI so it's quite normal that I hope they will interact smoothly !
As long as Michael does not consider his work on the exporter as finished I will not insist too much on this (at Luxology side). Seems we have at least two betas before us (next one and the one where vertices will be merged) but once the MoI exporter is completely finished I will try to report the remaining problems, if any, to Lux.
Cya

Dito. Modo is the easiest polygon modeler I've dealt with, and moi the easiest NURBS base modeler. I'm really really hoping Modo will have 3dm support down the road so that moi creations can be natively viewed and rendered without having to worry about exporting to obj.

>It's theoretically possible, but it would be quite enormously difficult to regear it all to do that.

:-) Of course. Just a thought on my part.