Facetting of .obj objects

[JohnRidgway]

I have a problem rendering objects imported in .obj format. I find that the object displays facetting. The same object imports fine into Vue and Bryce (in Bryce it needs smoothing). Is there something I'm doing wrong?

[MGebhart]

Try and export the Shuttle out of Vue as a .3ds file, then, if you have Poseray, import then export as an obj.

I could be wrong but, Terragen will not recognize smoothing groups. To be honest I'm probably way off on this since I've not tried it. However, I have done similar exports with the same issue.

Marc

[Kadri]

Look here :

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=6943.msg73918#msg73918

There are many more topics about this . With Poseray you will have more chance with importing objects to TG2 .

Kadri.

[JohnRidgway]

Many thanks for the tip - it's probably saved me buying Vue 8!!!
The full story on this:
The object was created in Cybermotion and exported in .obj format. This would not load into Poseray or Bryce but would load into Vue with no problems. I loaded in into Blender and smoothed it, also running a check on the normals. I output the file from Blender in .obj format. It would then load into Vue and Bryce without problem. On loading into Terragen 2 I produced the picture shown earlier. Following your suggestion, I loaded the file into Poseray (without problem) and output it again in .obj format. The sesult, loaded into Terragen 2 is as shown.

[Kadri]

I am glad it worked for you .

By the way welcome  here .
I am waiting for your images 

Kadri.

[MGebhart]

Man, that's a lot a hoops to jump through.

Looks great.

Marc

[Henry Blewer]

With models in Blender, it helps to have the smooth surfaces use separate vertexes from the flat surfaces. The vertexes can share the same locations; this helps when you want nice crisp flat areas. If the surfaces are joined, the curve gets calculated into the flat area. Sometimes this is not desired.

[Mandrake]

John, about all those steps..
Does your program cybermotion, (unknown to me) have max export 3ds? You may be able to go straight to PoseRay with that.
Also, in the future you may need to export you model in separate parts, I've done models in 13 parts because Poseray will only handle One curving at a time, certain parts of the model did not call for that curve so they were done separately. Looks great by the way!!

[JohnRidgway]

I dicovered that the normals on a number of facets had become inverted (odd because the ship was built in halves and joined in a Boolian op). The final model loads into Poseray in obj format without trouble and then was output to use in Terragen.
Final results below. 

[Henry Blewer]

Looks very good. The only drawback in the model is the way the specular highlight is rendered. Adding a 'generic panels' image to the specular channel would break this up some, and add more realism. The generic panels reference is from a Lightwave texture map tht was included in the 90's.

[rcallicotte]

Looks good.  I can't tell you how many times I've seen object problems in TG2 related to inverted Normals.