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Could any of the modonauts out there post their guidelines for getting good .obj files out of modo? I've not had much luck.

Some of the issues I've encountered:

• Full pathnames include spaces if using modo's built-in content on both Mac and Windows
  It seems that you can only have one material per mesh: is that right?
  Is there a way to make the .obj files portable between Mac and PC? It requires packaging the images and only using relative pathnames, I think.
  Other things?

I guess there are indirect methods: e.g. modo > Collada > meshLab > .obj > Octane.
For ArchiCAD I've found ArchiCAD > .3ds > meshLab > .obj > Octane seems to work except that the axes are rotated.

I've seen some great images rendered in Octane from modo: some input on workflow best practices would be really helpful.

Thanks,
tim

Many Thank , I'll try. "

timbarnes wrote:Could any of the modonauts out there post their guidelines for getting good .obj files out of modo? I've not had much luck.


I guess there are indirect methods: e.g. modo > Collada > meshLab > .obj > Octane.

Thanks,
tim

???

I export obj straight from modo and haven't encountered many problems. I just make sure that all polygons are UV-mapped and that multiple UV-sets are not used.

I export obj straight from modo and haven't encountered many problems. I just make sure that all polygons are UV-mapped and that multiple UV-sets are not used.

I use a number of the meshes provided with modo: they seem to organize materials in a way that doesn't export well. Also I am not sure how to make sure all polygons are UV-mapped. Does it just mean that materials are applied to all the polygons? Or is there more that I must do?

Thanks,
tim

Can't comment on all of that yet for lack of experience but...

I have had multiple materials per mesh. When the mesh comes into Octane those materials are all reset to a standard white, but they are all there. I can click on different parts of the mesh and get different materials. So no, the colors don't carry over, but the polygon tags do, which is the important part.

timbarnes wrote: I use a number of the meshes provided with modo: they seem to organize materials in a way that doesn't export well. Also I am not sure how to make sure all polygons are UV-mapped. Does it just mean that materials are applied to all the polygons? Or is there more that I must do?

Thanks,
tim

Hi,
No just applying a material wont do.

You can check if all polys are UV-mapped by opening the UV-viewport and selecting all the polys in the UV-viewport. Then check if all polys are selected in the 3d-viewport too. If not then some are not mapped.

I only do this if there's a problem with the textures when I load the model in Octane. Usually I set up all the materials/textures and just export as obj. The mtl file that also is generated tells Octane which textures etc should be used so I don't have to apply those again.

No just applying a material wont do.

You can check if all polys are UV-mapped by opening the UV-viewport and selecting all the polys in the UV-viewport. Then check if all polys are selected in the 3d-viewport too. If not then some are not mapped.

I only do this if there's a problem with the textures when I load the model in Octane. Usually I set up all the materials/textures and just export as obj. The mtl file that also is generated tells Octane which textures etc should be used so I don't have to apply those again.

Thanks, bazze.

Are you mostly creating your own textures, or do you use the materials in the modo content library? I believe that the .obj format expects textures to be in the same folder as the .mtl file (although modo outputs full path names). Some of the problems with finding textures seem to be related to Octane not working with pathnames that have spaces in them.

It would be best if modo would copy textures into the same folder as the .mtl file (i.e. the folder you're exporting to) and then the pathname would be just the filename. That would also make the .obj files portable across platforms and computers with different installation paths, which would be really helpful. But I guess that's a feature request and one that might not get high priority...

El Burritoh wrote:Can't comment on all of that yet for lack of experience but...

I have had multiple materials per mesh. When the mesh comes into Octane those materials are all reset to a standard white, but they are all there. I can click on different parts of the mesh and get different materials. So no, the colors don't carry over, but the polygon tags do, which is the important part.

That makes sense. I have the same thing happen when I import from ArchiCAD direct to modo. The textures are lost, but the tags are not. I tend to manually go through and separate the materials into their own mesh layers, which helps modo performance and also makes editing easier.

But having done some level of work on materials (especially using modo's built-in textures) it would be nice to be able to reliably transfer them into Octane. As I get time to do more experiments I'll publish the results.

t

Yeah who knows. Maybe Frederik's plug-in will do this!

Tim,

It may help to run the collect script that is readily available on the luxology forum to collect all the textures and copy them to a selected folder, then export your obj to that same folder.

Hope this helps.

Myles