Blog

I haven’t done a modo post for a while, so I’m overdue. Here’s an easy one that illustrates some of the cool features in modo that make it fast and easy to do some quick modeling. In this episode, we find your humble, challenged modonaut working on a project to reflect our new Iris Professional Services logo. Part of the project is to build a backdrop of tiles, and I had decided that I’d like to animate those so that a few individual blocks with 6 different colors on their faces would turn through the brief movie.

To do that, I’m using a couple features in modo: Instance Arrays, and Local Action Centers.

So, what are Instances and Local Action Centers?

You really should be reading the help that comes with modo – it’s quite good. But for now, I’ll describe them as simply as possible. An “Instance” is merely a copy of something, with the added benefit that if you change something on the original, it will be applied automatically to the copies. So, for a project like this, I’d like to make one cube, duplicate it a bunch of times, then apply materials, bevels, etc. to it instead of having to do the same thing over and over to each cube in the project.

Here’s a single block created in the modeling viewport. It’s 1”x1”x1”, and I’ve located it so that it sits just within the axis lines, nice and neat. It’s a simple matter of entering in a half an inch over to the right, back a half an inch, and up a half an inch instead of creating it right on the origin of the axis. I’d have to move it otherwise, so why not create it there?

Now it’s time to build the wall. Let’s go ahead and choose the “Duplicate” tab along the right side of the left window. It will give us a lot of options, and some you can find by clicking on the bottom corner of the description. For example, you could build an “Array” which would create a bunch of independent copies. But if we press on the corner, one of the options is to create an “Instance Array”, which is what we want. You can do similar things with Radial Arrays, too. Here’s a pick of the array for this project, 8 cubes wide by 5 cubes tall. I’m also spacing these out by .25” by entering an offset of 1.25” when creating the array.

To make the cubes turn, we’re going to need to work with the Pivots for each a bit. As things are now, modo created the cubes with their pivots at the corner of the cube. That could be useful, but not in this case. I want all the pivots to be in the middle of each cube so that when I rotate them they’ll stay in the same spot while they turn.

I’ll need to select the pivots, and to do that we’ll pull down the selection option from the “Items” button up top on the main viewport.

By default, the screen won’t show the pivots, but it’s easy to turn on the visibility. There are different ways to adjust the visibility options, but the easiest way for me is to just select the Display Options button at the top left of the viewport, right next to the “view” button (Front, Left, Perspective, etc.). Here’s what that looks like:

Now I can both see and select pivots for mesh objects. I do a quick lasso select, and it will show me all the pivots within that selection:

You can see what I mean about the pivots being tucked in the corner for each cube. This will not do. I want the pivots to be in the middle of each cube in all axes. To do that, we just do a Move Transform, and I use the “w” key to bring that up. But instead of dragging things around, I’d rather just enter in the values as parameters for the move, and those are in the bottom left hand window. Just as we did in the creation of the cubes, we’ll enter in a half an inch to the right, up, and back. If I turn the model a bit, you can see where all the pivots are now in the middle of their blocks.

For the purposes of this blog entry, I’d like to color each face of each cube so that you can easily see how they’re moving. Again, Instances make this a very simple operation. All I had to do was switch to Polygon selections, then select opposing faces on the bottom left hand block (mesh #1). Once selected, I applied some simple materials by pressing the “m” key, then selecting colors. Of course, this is really, really simple, but you could see how it would save you some time as each item gets more complex, has multiple layers in the materials on the shader tree, etc. To show the applied colors, here’s a view from the Render tab:

I quickly threw in a spotlight to make things easier to see, and changed the environment to a black background. Looks like a killer version of the Rubic’s Cube.

Now I just want to start selecting cubes and turning them. But I’d like to do it so that each cube follows it’s own orientation, or rules if you will. modo has several options to choose from in the area of “Action Centers”, which gives you choices as to exactly how you want to work with a given object. For this exercise, we want to choose “Local”, meaning that each cube with it’s pivot will rotate according to it’s own orientation, rather than that of the group’s. If that sounds confusing, then you’ll want to take a look at the excellent training videos that ship with modo. It’ll all become much clearer. Here’s how to enable Local Action Centers:

I’ve just chosen a bunch of blocks by changing to “Item” selection, then clicking either in the viewport or on the Items list on the right side window. Once I’ve got a bunch selected, I pull up the Rotate tool and spin them around a bit. I can also control the amount of rotation by entering in numbers in the parameters window in the lower right side. We definitely want this so that each face turns 90 degrees and everything remains straight. Here’s what it looks like halfway at 45 degrees:

After turning these selected cubes, I deselect everything, then start picking cubes at random in the “Items” window. I also make sure I set the Action Centers to “Local” – it should still be that way, but I want to verify it. Now, if I bring up the rotation tool and start turning cubes a bit, you can see where some are turning along with the tool, but others are turning in different directions. This is because the Local Action Centers makes the cubes remember their orientation, not the orientation of rest of the cubes. If I go halfway, here’s a picture that shows that mixed orientation:

I’d a little bit of a softer look to these cubes. Again, since they are Instances, I can modify the original cube (Mesh #1) in the lower left hand position and it will change all the other cubes. They could use a bevel, so the edges are selected and the bevel is applied. To set off the colors a bit, I applied a new material to the beveled edges, making it black. A press of the Tab key changes the items to Subdivision Surfaces, rounding them a bit more, and we end up with the following:

Summary

There you have it. A couple brainlessly easy tools to use in modo that will make your modeling career go much smoother. Again, check out the great help system in modo to learn more about Duplicating and Action Centers.