Wrong Scale From Hexagon Export

Tinjaw

I am working on a dog collar. I started it in Hexagon and want to move it to Carrara. When I export, I set the units of measure to mm. When it is opened in Carrara it is in inches.

I am also curious why Carrara is using inches, when I have set it to Metric in the preferences.

Dartanbeck

Units vary from one modeler to the next. It's all in the export/import that we need to get it right, and from there you convert it to something different, if you like. During an Export/Import OBJ operation, the unit of measure which they're asking for is that which equals a single unit for the chosen software.

Many OBJ Export/Import operation dialogs make this fairly clear, but it looks like Hexagon's might be a little more vague.

In D|S and in Carrara, there are the presets for importing and exporting obj files. We don't want to select "Carrara" as the software expectation, and then change the unit of measure, or we might as well not choose Carrara, and just set tyhe unit to whatever we want. Hopefully that makes more sense.

Anyways, onto the next issue, I'm not sure if this changes everything, but try this:

Open a scene

Select "Scene" in the instances tray on the right

Under the Interface tab, try setting the "Displayed Unit" in there. 

Not sure if that will work for you. I always just go with the flow. If I need precision, I just type the precise measurement into the field in question and Carrara converts the result for me. So I haven't actually tried this.

Tinjaw

@Dartanbeck

Thank you. You answered my questions well. I now understand things better.

Roygee

As Dart says, each aplication has its own scaling system and the trick is to get to know the relationships.  You don't say what you used to model the collar on, so we don't know what the original size was to compare with the imported size.  BTW, the Hexagon measurement system is Hexagon units, which don't relate to any measuring system, Imperial or Metric.  Size is not important, proportion is.

Just to give you an idea - Poser uses an extremely small scale, so when modelling something for a legacy Poser/Daz figure (such as, in this case, the MilDog) I import the dog into Hexagon at 500% to get something big enough to work with.  After modelling the collar, I exported it at 0.002 (inverse of 500) and imported it to Carrara at Poser scale. The proportions were correct.  In this case, the unit of measurement remains metric for me.

You can export from Hexagon as a Carrara scene file and the proportions will be correct, but this will give you a small scene size in Carrara.  Doing it this way will revert to the default inches bult into the Hexagon-Carrara exporter, regardless of  your export selection and show up in Carrara as inches.

 

Dartanbeck

My pleasure ;)

Tinjaw

Thanks for the added info @Roygee that helps.

Roygee

My pleasure:)