Hi, all.
 I love working with Blender, 3DExchange, Character Creator 3, and iClone.   I love that it allows me to bring my ideas to visual fruition, even though I'm nowhere near as skilled as many of the talented artists here.

  One thing I have noticed though,....   iProps that have been converted from .objs through 3DExchange tend to be quite a bit problematic once the conversion is done. I'll use wireframes of my Death Star City Sprawl as an example.

Death Star City Sprawl .obj wireframe in Blender
  Only 252 KB .obj. / 202B mtl.   Wow, kept it at around a quarter of a megabyte.

Death Star City Sprawl wireframe in iClone 7 after 3DExchange 7 conversion.
  iProp is 2.42MB.  (let's check that again....yep... MEGABYTES!)

As you can see, once the conversion is done, 3DExchange adds a LOT of messy geometry to the converted mesh.  This tends to make the iProp a bit....umm...memory intensive..as evidenced in the images  and makes for some pretty impossible stage large set ups, (I was trying to make a Death Star surface and trench comprised of a couple variants of City Sprawls...and 2.42MB meshes do tend to add up...QUICK!)  unless I am doing something wrong in the conversion, and as far as I know, I am not.   I always check my models in Blender before exporting them.   (remove duplicate vertices, smoothing, checking normals, exporting textures, etc), and when they come into 3DExchange, they pretty much look intact.  (Might need a little auto-smoothing, but beyond that, the meshes ususally look pretty good.)  Then 3DExchange does its work, and even though the mesh may look visually nice in iClone, in topology it is a freaking mess.  In Tesselation mode, the wireframe does indeed look neater, but it still has TONS of additional and unnecessary topology added.

  Quads become triangles.  

So, why all the extra (and shoddy) topology?   What can I do to eliminate this?   Or do you think at some point in the future, iClone will eventually be able to just start using .obj files. 
Thanks in advance,
Friendly Neighborhood Martok.





"Incompetence will always prevail so long as evil men stand by and do nothing."
-Martok2112