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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. More »

Taking Advantage of Luxology’s “user-friendly” Licensing

One of the best things I like about modo is the licensing, which is so much easier to live with and work with than other 3D applications. Instead of licensing the software to a machine, or worse yet to a dongle, Luxology assigns the license to you, the user. That means a lot of things: you can install the software on as many computers as you like as long as you’re personally using them and not other people using them. You can install it on your personal laptop, your work desktop, a machine at a client’s site, etc.

Or, as in this example, you can use it to set up your own network rendering “farm”. All without buying any more licenses or installing any network rendering software. Got some older machines that meet at least the minimum requirements for modo, or have some under-utilized desktops or servers in your network? Then you can use that power to speed up your rendering! This capability works on both Mac’s and Windows PC’s by the grace of Bonjour networking.

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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.

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The simple way to do natural light in Modo 302

When it comes to lighting, texturing, shading, and all that stuff, Modo really is fun and easy to work with. One of the new features in Modo 302 is a simple Physical Sun and Sky setup that gives great results without requiring a lot of tweaks or time. Of course, if you want to tweak, you’ve got all the controls available, but the defaults are pretty good right out of the box.

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More musings on Modo

It’s been a busy first half of the year, including a trip to the Industrial Designer’s Society of America Western Region meetings in Portland last month where we had a great time demo’ing Modo and the integration with Rhino. Many thanks to Bob Bennett and Luxology for their help with that, by the way!

I finally got some time to kick back and explore more Modo, digging through the excellent help files and learning more about how Modo does Animation. All 3D animation applications handle things a little differently and it takes a little practice to get acclimated to each, but the experience also points out how useful it is to use multiple applications in a pipeline. All of the basic Transforms are easy to animate and practically everything in Modo can be Keyed, but Modo has a really cool Morph Map function that can be easily animated, and with it you can really speed up a project.

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Transitioning from NURBs

Lately I’ve been getting deeper into Modo from Luxology. It’s a poly and subdivision surface modeler (as well as animation and rendering engine) which is great, but I really liked working with the NURBS in Studio Tools and Maya. For some things it’s easier just to lay out curves and sweep the surfaces, at least for me. While Modo doesn’t have NURBs, it does allow you to do some of the same kind of modeling using curves and Patch Curves tools. This is where you find the Patch Curves tool. It’s the same button used for the other Curves.

The Hitch:

If you follow the otherwise great help system, it does tell you how to create the Patch. However, it leaves out one really important step that you have to do otherwise it doesn’t work. I’d lay out four curves, snap the vertices to each other, then try to run the Patch. No such luck. You can extend the curves on the ends for some cool effects, but no surface like you’d get using a Boundary or Square in Alias.

The Fix:
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