I purchased some models on turbo squid. The only format it came in was blender. It is a set of buildings that I want to use in my next game. One of the reasons that I bought this particular set of buildings is because the "texture" on the buildings is not being done with image textures, but rather the actual geometry of the models themselves has edges and corners and such. it is pretty detailed. Here is a link to an image as shown in blender:

http://www.shatalmic.com/images/TexturedBuildings1.png

I created a new XNA 3.1 project and connected XSI Mod Tool 7.5 to that project and created the XSI project. That part went fine.

I then exported the blender objects as OBJ files. I tried several other formats and ended up using OBJ because it seemed to import into XSI the best.

The blender models all used regular materials. Since the buildings have detailed geometry the materials just need to be colors. The author used clusters to assign the different colors to where they need to be.

Since XSI and XNA need .fx type materials I had to create a bunch of .fx based materials to replace the simple color materials. I chose Phong because that is the one I am used to using. I don't know what the differences are between the ones that come with XSI.

I created a material from the Phong.fx effect for each color and set the color values to match the originals. The colors seem to have come out. Here is a link to an image showing what it looks like in XSI Mod Tool 7.5:

http://www.shatalmic.com/images/TexturedBuildings2.png

As you can see and the reason for this post, the detailed texture geometry is all gone. If I go into XSI and edit one of the individual buildings and select some of the details and pull the vertices out they are there. The geometry shows up if I move the vertices far enough, but no matter how far I move them to try to create indents into the building for a textured look the buildings still look smooth.

I am sure I am just not using the right kind of effect. So what do I use? I don't want any smoothing to happen. I want every little detail of the building geometry to show up easily.

Any ideas??