Originally posted by ZeqMacaw:

Originally posted by Vintage:

Oh, so that's actually completely intentional. I think it's a stupid change, since $CDMaterials...

To avoid other problems and for learning what others actually used to make a model, writing what was actually used to make the MDL seemed best overall.

I've found this actually confuses people more, it's best to use the $cdmaterials for its intended use. I help people on a regular basis, sometimes they fill out the $cdmaterials, but not change the materials on the mesh, then they're surprised the model can't find the textures.

That doesn't seem logical, as long as two polys are in the same smoothing group, they should have two matching vertices, so an edge between them would never be marked sharp.

Thanks anyway though, I guess the best thing to do is wait then.

I realize that, I mentioned that, the sharp edges and everything.

The way I imagined it would work is at some point during the import, a vertex is compared to all others, if one exists at the same coordinates, but has a different normal, then there'd be a vertex in the same poly where it came from that would also have a vertex in the same spot with different normals; selecting both vertices would select an edge which can be marked sharp.

Though I see the problem would be to descern which vertex in the list of vertices corresponds to which in the imported model.

From what I've seen, the vertex normals are stored in a list somewhere, the list is currently commented out because nothing is done with it; but put it back in and the normals would be stored locally, so it can be iterated over. Though doing that would cause importing to take very much longer because every new vertex would have to be compared to every other already in there, it's better than nothing at the moment.

For the record I'm more for the second option, because it's more likely to keep the UVs intact.

When importing any SMD, the smoothing groups are completely destroyed (unless I've missed something). It should be possible to leave them intact.

I've taken the liberty of looking through the code and I believe there are two ways of doing so:

• Join vertices upon importing, rather than remove doubles.
  
• Tag edges as sharp when necessary, then add an edge split modifier.