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A new month, and new toys!
Besides showing some of the new features on tap for modo in version 4.xx, Luxology has released the import/export tools for Rhino and SketchUp. I’ve been trying these out for the last few months, and it’s really good to see these things being released and available to current modo users. I’ve also been kicking around the Mac OS X Beta version of Rhino, and while it’s not quite ready for Prime Time, it is really a joy to use.

Also just released was version 4 of Parallels, and some casual testing on my MacBook Pro has been very positive. Where previous versions simply wouldn’t even start modo, Version 4 seems to cook along smoothly. You can even setup the number of processors in Parallels and you’ll see the corresponding number of buckets in a modo render. So far so good.

But, back to our post. This one is going to show some of the basics in working with the Rhino plugin for modo, and I’ve used the Beta of Rhino Mac OS X to generate the test files.

Let’s Start with the Rhino Victim

Rhino is a very capable, very cool program used to design very cool and beautiful/functional things. This is not one of them, but I needed a widget or doohickey to work with. This really would have been slightly easier to build in modo, but whatever… Here’s the victim:

Yep. Nothing fancy there. This was done using the standard NURBS functionality in Rhino. If you don’t like this, you can always use the classic Rhino model itself, or one of your favorite test files. I suggest something simple for reasons you’ll see later.

So, the subject is created and saved as a 3dm file as per usual. The instructions to install the Rhino importer/exporter into modo are very simple, so I won’t go over those here. I will testify that they do indeed work and install as advertised.

You’d think the next step would be to simply open up the 3dm file in modo, and sure enough modo will let you do that. However, you’ll be looking at a screen like this:

As you can see, or not see, there is an object in the scene called “doohickey”, however nothing shows in the display port. If I go in to the other windows, nothing shows there either. I got nothin. At first this causes me some distress, but then I got the bright idea to actually read through the notes and figured it out. It only works with meshes, which makes total sense. My usual “quick start” methodology fails me again…

Back to Rhino, Create a Mesh

So I open up the doohickey.3dm file in Rhino, and it’s a simple process to convert this to a mesh that we can work with in modo. The menu bar shows an entry called “Mesh”, and since we’re converting a NURBS model to a Mesh, the first item on the list will do the trick. Here’s the pic:

Once you do that, you get some options as to how much mesh detail you want and a chance to preview it. For this exercise, I just went with the default middle setting:

The result is a meshed-up doohickey. I have to say that the NURBS model was prettier to look at. This is kinda busy, and I probably should have reduced the amount of detail. It’ll have to do.

Do Over – Opening the Mesh in modo

OK. Now when I open up the 3dm file in modo, I actually get something on the screen. However, there are some not so good things in it that need to be fixed. These may be due to how the object was originally created, but in any event they need to get fixed. Here’s what it looks like:

If you check on the right hand side, you’ll see a whole bunch of new meshes, not just one. This is actually pretty useful as you can select the mesh from the item list, then flip the polys as needed. Select the item you need to flip, then hit the “F” key to flip those bad boys.

Do some additional modeling in modo

Not one to leave something well enough alone, I decided to tweak the corners on the model a bit, beveling a bunch of the corner polys to create some additional detail (if you want to call it that). Here’s the victim after the tweaking:

Once that’s done, the file needs to be saved. You’ve got the option to save it as a 3dm Rhino file for additional work in Rhino if you want, and that’s what we’ll show here. Of course, you could save it as a modo file, OBJ, or other format if you prefer. Doing a “Save As”, you’ll get the option to save as a 3dm file for Rhino. Here’s what that looks like:

The warning you’ll get will inform you that the translator can only work with polys that have 3 or 4 vertices. Plan accordingly!

Once that’s done, you can open it up in Rhino just like any other 3dm file. At first it looks mostly OK, but you’ll want to take a closer look to make sure everything came out the way you expected. There are some small things that need to be addressed in the Rhino project, and if you do a quick shade or render they’ll turn up pretty quickly. Take a look, and adjust as necessary. Here’s what the doohickey looks like when opened in Rhino:

So what?

So, it looks like the import/export translator works fairly well, but there are some things that you’ll need to check out when using it. A little cleanup isn’t that bad, though. This gives the modo user a very powerful toolset for doing NURBS modeling and still get it in and out of modo, where you can Paint, model, texture, light, animate, etc. to your heart’s content. Kinda nice. For our friends in the Industrial Design field, the import/export tool makes a strong argument for adding modo to their workflow, as if they needed more reasons. Give it a shot and let us know what you think!

Paul