Research, Shockwave 3D, and Nulls

After noticing the troubling artifacts that appeared on my 3D models when I exported them to the shockwave 3D format, and not being able to get rid of them yesterday, I decided to look for some alternatives to the Shockwave 3D exporter that we have been using in Cinema 4D. I came up with a few different altenatives which Stephen and I looked at more closely today. We tried out one called Shapeshifter which is an extra specifically for Director, unfortunately its results were worse. Then Stephen came up with the idea that maybe Director wasn't having enough time to draw our objects and therefore wer were getting these artifacts. To test this theory he gave the objects more time to load, but this didn't solve the problem. Finally, after looking at the odd triangular white (non-textured) artifacts it occured to him that maybe there were some stray points that Shockwave 3D did not know how to handle since it can only deal with triangles. In questioning me about the structure of my file it occured to him that Shockwave 3D doesn't know how to handle nulls, and when I counted how many I had in my file it matched the number of artifacts we were getting. We then adjusted the file so that it did not contain any nulls and rexported. The model no longer has artifactcs. What a fantastic discovery!