My plans were to try going the SketchUp route.
I'll export the different sections separately - this is because the SketchUp .skp export filter in MoI does not save the material data, so everything comes in as white.
IF MoI will export the mesh object (with a lower poly structure, of course). Then I have no doubt that SketchUp will not have too much difficulty handling for export into Kerkythea.

This is a test, indeed.


...You could try exporting just chunks or x-number of strands of the mesh object...

Why pass by Sketchup?
Kerkythea open in direct OBJ, 3DS....
Seems these formats are inside Moi export ;)
Kerkythea is also a standalone ;)
As you export part by part just add material when they arrive in kerky ;)

Thanks for the tutorial. Speaker looks really great.. Thumbs up. :-)



>>>>
for Rich:
this is a similar case like the pineapple when a complex geometry(mesh speaker or pineapple patterns)can be made by render engine (opacity map for mesh speaker and displacement map for pineapple)
you are right,but here we are to model not to render,sometime could be necessary have a geometry
<<<<<

Please let this rest. It was not an attack against you, I just was trying to be helpful.
You already told me your thoughts about this. No need to tell me this again.

Peace,
Rich_Art. ;-)

Hold on.... let me check that...

Holy cats!!!!! It not only takes .obj files - but it's in 64 bit ... and I have 4x2 cores!
...no materials yet, no lights... It may take a while to set up.

Now I can go directly from MoI to render.
Thanks Pilou!

Cool tutorial, thanks!

Marc

This render was just one light and a simple chrome material. ...I need time to set everything up right.

Does anyone know why this model imported on it's side? (.obj)
AND... does the .obj exporter know to "smooth" the edges of it's surface polys?

I should build a universal modeling room with good lights and a nice camera setup, so all I have to do is import the .obj model.

I had MoI crash at first when exporting to the .skp, but I chose an extremely low poly setting. It worked after sitting for a bit.

Hi Mike,

> Does anyone know why this model imported on it's side? (.obj)

What program are you importing it into?

Some programs interpret the Y axis to be the up direction and other programs interpret the Z axis to be the up direction.

You can adjust how MoI does the export with a setting under Options > Import/Export > OBJ options > Orientation.


> AND... does the .obj exporter know to "smooth" the edges of it's surface polys?

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this - but the OBJ file is exported with vertex normals information which controls how the smooth shading is done in the rendering program.


> I had MoI crash at first when exporting to the .skp, but I chose
> an extremely low poly setting. It worked after sitting for a bit.

If you had a crash dump file generated (a moi_report.zip file) can you please send it in to me at moi@moi3d.com so I can take a look at it? I have seen a couple of different crashes in the SkpWriter library before though involving points merging together. Those are difficult for me to fix up since it's a compiled library provided by SketchUp and the source code is not available for it.

Also SketchUp does not allow any polygons to exist that have edges less than 0.001 inches in size (I think that's it), it just ignores little polygons like that or may possibly try to merge their points together with neighboring ones making degenerate stuff. So SKP format is not a good format to do a very high density output to since it does not fundamentally handle little tiny polygons.

- Michael

Thanks Michael,

I'm using Kerkythea-v2.5.2 Beta 64bit.

I just imported a .obj file made from MoI and I got this:


There are all kinds of bad things happening. This is without the massive mesh object. Am I doing something wrong?

Where is this report file located, or was it something it wanted to save but did not get a chance?

What I mean by "smoothing" (SU term) is an attribute between two polys where they tell the renderer to either Phong blend them or to allow them to look "faceted".




Tried a .3ds file. I didn't come in bad like that. It was tiny however and the colors were gone. The materials list on the side listed every object in the model instead.

The setting to "Z-Up" fixed that, but I'm having degenerated polys everywhere as show in the pic. I tried lower angle-out settings too.

Try first with very small objects ;)
Not sure that the format 3Ds keep the color! skp no (and not also any names) you must export in 3Ds then explode in Sketchup
objects named must keeping but with maybe name become something like ob01, ob02 etc...

Hi Mike,

> I just imported a .obj file made from MoI and I got this:

That's the kind of thing that happens when a renderer tries to triangulate a complex n-gon but doesn't quite do a good enough job of it and has triangles kind of leaking to the outside of the n-gon instead of only generating triangles inside of the n-gon.

You might want to send that file to the Kerkythea as a bug report for an example of an n-gon triangulation failure.

In the meantime, to avoid that problem use the "Output: Quads & Triangles" option when exporting out from MoI rather than "Output: N-gons". That will use MoI's mechanism for triangulating the n-gon instead of relying on Kerkythea to do it.

Generating a good triangulation from complex n-gons is a fairly tricky business - some programs are not very refined in that particular area so if you encounter that you shouldn't export n-gons to them.


> Where is this report file located, or was it something it wanted
> to save but did not get a chance?

It depends whether you're running in XP or if you're running on Vista or Win7 with UAC enabled. Under XP they'll be written to the same location as moi.exe .

With UAC enabled in Vista or Win7, programs are prevented from writing to the "Program Files" folder, and in that case it will go to your %Temp% folder - go to Start > Run and put in %Temp% to go to that folder.


> What I mean by "smoothing" (SU term) is an attribute between
> two polys where they tell the renderer to either Phong blend them
> or to allow them to look "faceted".

When exporting to OBJ format MoI does export vertex normals that should be used by the renderer to handle phong shading.

SketchUp however is an exception and doesn't make use of that particular vertex normal data like other renderers - instead SketchUp always calculates its own vertex normals from the polygon data and instead relies on flags on each edge for whether it's supposed to be a smooth looking boundary or not. When you export from MoI to SKP format MoI's exporter will set those edge flags so edges on polygons from a smooth surface are both hidden and have their smooth flag set.

For going to Kerkythea I believe that it will make use of the vertex normals in the OBJ file to do the shading, so the data that MoI exports there will directly control the phong shading in that case. That tends to give the best results because the vertex normals come from the original NURBS surface, so using them to do the shading makes the polygons shade in the exact same way as the original surface.

In SketchUp the shading tends to be a little bit off since it doesn't use the original vertex normals and instead cooks up its own from the polygon data.

- Michael

Hi Mike, looks like you added some more to your post that I didn't see.

> Tried a .3ds file. I didn't come in bad like that. It was tiny
> however and the colors were gone. The materials list on the
> side listed every object in the model instead.

MoI currently only exports style/material information to LWO and OBJ polygon formats.

3DS should generally be avoided - it's a really antique old format and has a lot of limits in it like a 16-bit numeric limit for the max number of vertices in a single mesh, and no provision for vertex normals or polygons with more than 3 sides.

Only use 3DS as a last resort method, you will usually get much better results with OBJ files.


> The setting to "Z-Up" fixed that, but I'm having degenerated
> polys everywhere as show in the pic. I tried lower angle-out
> settings too.

That's because you're exporting n-gons and the n-gon triangulation on Kerkythea is a bit buggy with handling complex n-gons, which is fairly common since it's a bit of a tricky thing to make really robust.

If you switch to export Quads & Triangles or Triangles only out of MoI it will avoid that problem and it should work a lot better for you.

- Michael

Whew!

Bless you Michael!!!

Exporting with Quads and Triangle did the trick - And the materials with the naming was retained!
This is wonderful!


And hopefully, the positioning data is retained, so that Kerky puts everything where I left them in MoI, instead of centering newly merged into the scene - but I'll have to experiment with that.

Hi Mike, I'm glad that's working for you now!

> And hopefully, the positioning data is retained, so that
> Kerky puts everything where I left them in MoI, instead
> of centering newly merged into the scene - but I'll have
> to experiment with that.

MoI does not alter the object's location when it creates the OBJ file so if you're seeing something like imported objects being centered that is something that Kerkythea is deciding to do to the import - there is probably some setting in it that you can change to make it stop doing that.

- Michael

I had problems trying to re-export the mesh object, MoI crashed. I sent the canned error zip to you, but the OS just may need to be re-booted.

I had the one I made earlier and combined it with the other parts of the speaker.

Kerkythea Boost, Metropolis Light Transform (BPT), only a few passes, but this image was reduced by 2 to clear up the noise.
Used one omni-light at a low angle. And a little F# tweaking on the camera.

Not bad for my little bit of knowledge with MoI-Kerky rendering.

Hi Mike, thanks for sending the crash report. I'll take a look and see if something can be tuned up so that it becomes just a failure rather than a crash but often times out of memory handling is quite difficult to deal with well. Just in general it's not something that I expect to get to as high a level of robustness as regular operation. One reason for that is that it's difficult to test and replicate the problem with the memory allocation failing in the exact same way as it did during your run.

Usually it is best to try and avoid running out of memory in the first place. If you know that you have a particularly heavy model and that it is likely to run out of memory try exporting it in some chunks instead of all in one big piece.

- Michael

Thanks,

Yeah.. I looked at that silly CPU/MEM "Gadget" Windows 7 has, it was at around 25%.
And there may be something else not set right. The vid driver temporarily crashed twice today. Once when only Adobe reader was running.
But me and my brother are still in the "let's see if this baby really works" phase of this new work PC.

But man! Does it feel good to get a MoI model rendered. :-)

Hi Mike, one thing to keep in mind is that MoI is a 32-bit program, so it will max out at something like around 3.6 GB of memory usage, not when all your full 64-bit system memory is exhaused.

So to monitor MoI for running out of memory, if you're on a high memory 64-bit OS you'll really need to monitor MoI.exe in the process list and not just your overall system memory consumption. If you're on a 32-bit OS or on 64-bit with more like 4GB of memory then you could watch overall system memory.

When you have a particularly high level of geometry like you're doing here you will probably need to pay some extra attention to some things like this which you don't need to worry about so much with a more regular kind of model.

You also may get some better results for high complexity models if you reduce the display mesh density to be coarser - that can help to reduce memory consumption by quite a bit.

Some details for that in this previous post:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4196.2

The settings for that are under Options > View > Meshing parameters - try setting "Mesh angle" to 25 degrees and uncheck "Add detail to inflections". That may reduce memory load a fair amount.

- Michael

Hi Mike,

> And there may be something else not set right. The vid driver
> temporarily crashed twice today.

You might make sure it's not getting overheated - is your system possibly overclocked?

Also it's probably a good idea to go directly to your video card manufacturer's web site and download the latest driver they have available from there to see if that helps.

- Michael

Thanks for that advice... I was wondering about the limitations being a 32 bit app.

We were thinking some of the same things about the video.
I had a tech put me on a different login with admin priv. due to requirements to get my M$ Outlook connected among other things.
An error log my brother was looking at eluded to the fact that something was denied some type of privileges when MoI crashed.
I plan on uninstalling and re-installing the INVIDIA driver in the morning to rule that out.

If it was a hardware problem the vid card blackouts (2 of them) would have happened when I was taxing my system... hard to tell at this stage.
But yes... that model is a stresser for MoI under any circumstances.

MAJIKMIKE -

I really like the render - nice dramatic lighting. Again, a fantastic model and I'm trying it out right now in KeyShot (still can't get the grill exported out of MoI due to memory limit).

Do you mind if I post a KeyShot version later tonight?

Ed