Modo 501 is out now. How are the smoothing groups?
http://www.luxology.com/modo/index.aspx
One of modo 5's new features is smoothing groups. Just wondering how it compares to what Max has and whether it will be as useful as people hope.
One of modo 5's new features is smoothing groups. Just wondering how it compares to what Max has and whether it will be as useful as people hope.
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Would still be nice to hear some views on this
[ame]
http://www.luxology.com/modo/tour/newmodelingtools.aspx
Maintaining curvature when adding loops, aligning verts, seeing UV distortion, and Diagonal Edge Select to convert triangles back in to quads... I'll be using these!
So right now i am just waiting on someone from 3 point studios to tell us the truth(mainly EarthQuake)
1. Smoothing groups appear transfer over properly with both FBX options. That's good. Unfortunately with Autodesk FBX the vertex normals appear to be messed up somehow.
2. My object has 2 unique UV sets of which both imported, but with the Autodesk FBX file format they go into the wrong channels. They are importing to UV channel 1 and 2, UDK appears to be creating an extra blank UV set at channel 0. That's not so good. The UVs should be imported as channel 0 and 1.
With the Autodesk FBX 2006.11 file format both sets of UVs import into the proper channels.
3. Vertex Colors appear to import properly as well, but only with Autodesk FBX, not Autodesk FBX 2006.11
4. Interestingly enough UDK appears to understand the right up vector for the model. In other words my Modo is set to "Y" up, UDK is "Z" up, yet my model imports and is facing the right direction. Cool.
Some steps to take to make sure smoothing groups export properly from Modo and import properly into UDK:
1. System -> Preferences... -> Scene I/O -> FBX Export -> Edge Smoothing needs to be checked ON (I think).
2. Make sure the Smoothing Angle setting on your material(s) is set to 180.0°.
3. Apply your smoothing groups. Geometry -> Polygon -> Set Smoothing Groups...
4. Exporting the FBX, if you choose:
File -> Export As -> Autodesk FBX 2006.11.
You will get the correct UV channels, correct smoothing groups, correct vertex normals, but NOT vertex colors.
File -> Export As -> Autodesk FBX.
You will get incorrect UV channels(see above notes), correct smoothing groups, messed up vertex normals(see image above), and correct vertex colors.
5. When you import your model into UDK and the Import dialog pops up. Scroll down to the Static Mesh section and uncheck "Explicit Normals".
After a quick look Collada appears to import UVs, Smoothing Groups, Vertex normals, and Vertex colors.
The scale is not correct though (will have to look into this later...), and there seems to be -20% saturation from the actual colors of the vertex colors with Collada.
Here is the LXO, 2 FBXs, and DAE files if anyone wants to check them out:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1447878/Modo501_UDK_Test_Meshes.zip
That's it for UDK, now if only my copy(s) of Unity wouldn't crash constantly on startup even after a full uninstall/re-install (both 2.6 and 3.1) I'd test that as well...
I heard that unreal was working on a export/import for modo to udk? either way, i just hope on the next modo update they will fix this. this is SUCH an important tool for us game modelers, i hope luxology sees this and does something soon. i'm going to write up a bug for them. thanks ben
Anyway here are my findings concerning exporting from Modo 501 to Unity 3.1 using the Collada DAE, Autodesk FBX, and Autodesk FBX 2006.11 file formats.
With Unity 3.1 we have somewhat different results than with the UDK December beta.
Collada DAE seems to be pretty good all around. It supports smoothing groups, vertex colors, and multiple uv sets.
Interestingly the vertex colors appear to be the same colors as Autodesk FBX, so I'm guessing the earlier issue with UDK and vertex colors is probably UDK's fault not Modo's. Also the DAE's scale is interpreted by Unity perfectly, which is very nice.
My only complaint so far is that it's rather messily organized as far as Unity is concerned. Saving straight from a LXO to DAE Unity displays a bunch of extra nodes, RenderNode, Light_Directional_LightNode, two MeshNodes, and a CameraNode. The Camera Node and Light Node can be avoided by deleting the Camera and Directional Light from the LXO in Modo, but I don't know how to get rid of the Render Node or the extra Mesh Node.
Autodesk FBX seems like it would be ideal as it has the cleanest node structure in Unity with just the Mesh Node, supports multiple UVs, and Vertex Colors. Awesome! except for one major flaw... smoothing groups don't transfer over at all even with Normals and Tangents both set to "Import"
Autodesk FBX 2006.11 is similar to Autodesk FBX as smoothing groups don't transfer over, though it does support multiple UVs. Autodesk FBX 2006.11 also shows the same lack of vertex colors as it did in UDK.
The next thing I'm planning to do is look through the actual text of the files generated to see if any minor edits can fix any of these issues. It might be a while though as I'm definitely not an expert with the internals of file formats. At least not yet anyway...