Blender 4.3.0 has strange normal/rendering issues under the Cycles renderer

[ailenneko]

The above image is the result under the EEVEE (Next) renderer.

The above image is the result under the Cycles renderer.

I'm using Blender version 4.3.0 and I can confirm that version 4.2.3 is fine. I suspect there are some minor issues with the OBJ format, as the same problem happened in a previous version of Blender. I'm not sure if this is a problem with Blender or an issue with the plugin generating the OBJ format.

[QuestionableM]

Looks like the latest version of Blender might've changed the node names again. I'll take a look at it when I have some free time.

Thanks for your report though.

[QuestionableM]

It looks like it's not the Plugins fault that the rendering is messed up now. It looks like Blender does some additional post-processing on the .obj which breaks the normals.

[QuestionableM]

As of now the only solution that i could find is to use the "Separate by Shapes" method of object separation in SM-Converter. Gonna investigate if I can do anything on my side.

[QuestionableM]

Yeah ok. All Blender versions starting from 4.3.0 automatically merge the vertices with the same coordinates, which breaks everything. And there seems to be no way of disabling that.

[QuestionableM]

New update: Was able to fix the issue by removing my vertex deduplication algorithm. It looks like blender no longer supports vertex references (i.e. referencing the same vertex id in multiple triangles). Gonna push an update with a new "Deduplicate Vertices" option which will be turned off by default.

[QuestionableM]

@ailenneko I've pushed a new prerelease which added an aforementioned option. Will close the issue once i'll be assured that it is solved.

[ailenneko]

It seems like the issue still hasn’t been resolved. I just tested it with the latest version.
I selected "Group by active object" and checked "Remove redundant vertices."
There still appears to be a strange normal direction issue when using the Cycles renderer.

Looking forward to the official release! Thanks again for this plugin.