modo (software)

modo

Developer(s)	Luxology, LLC
Stable release	501 / December 15, 2010
Operating system	Mac OS X , Windows
Type	3D computer graphics
License	Proprietary
Website	www.luxology.com/modo/

modo is a polygon and subdivision surface modeling, sculpting, 3D painting, animation and rendering package developed by Luxology, LLC. The program incorporates features such as n-gons, 3D painting and edge weighting, and runs on Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows platforms.

History

modo was created by the same core group of software engineers that previously created the pioneering 3D application LightWave 3D, originally developed on the Amiga platform and bundled with the Amiga-based Video Toaster workstations that were popular in television studios in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They are based in Mountain View, California.

In 2001, a rift developed between senior management at NewTek (makers of LightWave) and their key LightWave engineers regarding the notion for a complete rewrite of LightWave's work-flow and technology ^[1]. Newtek's Vice President of 3D Development, Brad Peebler, eventually left Newtek to form Luxology, and was joined by Allen Hastings and Stuart Ferguson (the lead developers of Lightwave), along with most of the Lightwave programming team.

After more than three years of development work, modo was demonstrated at Siggraph 2004 and released in September of the same year. In April 2005, the high-end visual effects studio Digital Domain integrated modo into their production pipeline. Other studios to adopt modo include Pixar, Industrial Light & Magic, Zoic Studios id Software, Eden FX, Studio ArtFX, The Embassy Visual Effects, Naked Sky Entertainment and Spinoff Studios.

At Siggraph 2005, modo 201 was pre-announced. This promised many new features including the ability to paint in 3D (à la ZBrush, BodyPaint 3D), multi-layer texture blending, as seen in LightWave, and, most significantly, a rendering solution which promises physical-based shading rendering, true lens distortion, anisotropic reflection blurring and built-in polygon instancing. modo 201 was released on May 24, 2006.

modo 201 was the winner of the Apple Design Awards for Best Use of Mac OS X Graphics for 2006. In October 2006, modo also won "Best 3D/Animation Software" from MacUser magazine. In January 2007, modo won the Game Developer Frontline Award for "Best Art Tool".

modo 202 was released on August 1, 2006. It offered faster rendering speed and several new tools including the ability to add thickness to geometry. A 30 day full-function trial version of the software was made available.

modo was recently used in the production of the feature films Stealth, Ant Bully, and Wall*E.

In March 2007, Luxology released modo 203 as a free update. It included new UV editing tools, faster rendering and a new DXF translator.

The release of modo 301 on September 10, 2007 added animation and sculpting to its toolset. The animation tools include being able to animate cameras, lights, morphs and geometry as well as being able to import .mdd files. Sculpting in modo 301 is done through mesh based and image based sculpting (vector displacement maps) or a layered combination of both.

modo 302, was released on April 3, 2008 with some tool updates, more rendering and animation features and a physical sky and sun model. modo 302 was a free upgrade for existing users. modo 303 was skipped in favor of the development of modo 401.

modo 401 shipped on June 18, 2009. This release has many animation and rendering enhancements and is newly available on 64-bit Windows. On October 6, 2009, modo 401 SP2 was released followed by modo 401 SP3 on January 26, 2010 and SP5 on July 14th of the same year.^[2]

modo 501, the current version, shipped on December 15, 2010. This new version was the first to run on 64-bit Mac OS X. It contains support for Pixar Subdivision Surfaces, faster rendering and a visual connection editor for creating re-usable animation rigs.

Workflow

modo's workflow differs substantially from many other mainstream 3D applications. While Maya and 3ds Max stress using the right tool for the job, modo artists typically use a much smaller number of basic tools and combine them to create new tools using the Tool Pipe and customizable action centers and falloffs.

Action Centers

modo allows an artist to choose the "pivot point" of a tool or action in realtime simply by clicking somewhere. Thus, modo avoids making the artist invoke a separate "adjust pivot point" mode. In addition, the artist can tell modo to derive a tool's axis orientation from the selected or clicked on element, bypassing the needs for a separate "adjust tool axis" mode.

Falloffs

Any tool can be modified with customizable falloff, which modifies its influence and strength according to geometric shapes. Radial falloff will make the current tool affect elements in the center of a resizable sphere most strongly, while elements at the edges will be barely affected at all. Linear falloff will make the tool affect elements based on a gradient that lies along a user-chosen line, etc.

For example, imagine a situation where a flat 8x8 plane must be transformed into a mountain. In Maya, the artist would use the specialized bulge or soft modification tool to raise the center polygons more than the surrounding ones. A modo artist would instead use the basic move tool combined with a radial falloff to ensure that the polygons were raised at differing rates. In this way, modo emphasizes re-usability, meaning that the smaller selection of tools and actions can be combined in ways that mimic a much larger toolset without its complication or memory footprint.

3D painting

modo allows an artist to paint directly onto 3D models and even paint instances of existing meshes onto the surface of an object. The paint system allows users to use a combination of tools, brushes and inks to achieve many different paint effects and styles. Examples of the paint tools in modo are airbrush, clone, smudge, and blur. These tools are paired with your choice of "brush" (such as soft or hard edge, procedural). Lastly, you add an ink, an example of which is image ink, where you paint an existing image onto a 3D model. Pressure sensitive tablets are supported. The results of painting are stored in a bitmap and that map can be driving anything in modo's Shader Tree. Thus you can paint into a map that is acting as a bump map and see the bumps in real-time in the viewport.

Renderer

modo's renderer is multi-threaded and scales nearly linearly with the addition of processors or processor cores. That is, an 8-core machine will render a given image approximately eight times as fast as a single-core machine with the same per-core speed. modo runs on up to 32 cores and offers the option of network rendering on up to 50 workstations with any number of cores.

In addition to the standard renderer, which can take a long time to run with a complex scene on even a fast machine, modo has a progressive preview renderer. Compared to the standard renderer, it sacrifices accuracy in favor of speed, while still giving a more accurate view of the scene than the typical hardware shading options offered by most 3D programs of modo's caliber. modo's user interface allows you to configure a work space that includes a preview render panel, which renders continuously in the background, restarting the render every time you change the model. This gives a more accurate preview of your work in progress as compared to the typical hardware shading options. In practice, this means you can do fewer full test renders along the way toward completion of a project. The preview renderer in modo 401 offers progressive rendering, meaning the image resolves to near final image quality if you let it keep running.

modo material assignment is done via a shader tree that is layer-based rather than node-based.

modo's renderer is a physically based ray-tracer. It includes features like caustics, dispersion, stereoscopic rendering, fresnel effects, subsurface scattering, blurry refractions (e.g. frosted glass), volumetric lighting (smokey bar effect), and Pixar-patented Deep Shadows.

Select features

• N-gon modeling and rendering (subdivided polygons with >4 points)
• Tool Pipe for creating customized tools
• Edges and Edge Weighting
• User specified navigation controls for zoom, pan
• Macros
• Scripting (Perl, Python, Lua)
• Customizable User Interface
• Extensive file input and output including X3D file export

Key modeling features

• Mesh Instancing
• Mesh Paint Tool
• Solid Sketch
• Edge Slide
• Polygon Reduction Tool
• Reference Layers
• Sketch Bevel
• Loop Slice
• Flex tool (for mesh posing)
• Morph Tool
• N-Gon SDS
• 1-Click Macro Recording
• LUA, and/or Perl; Scripting Engines
• Bridge Tool
• High-Speed OpenGL Navigation
• Extensive Falloff System Including Path and Lasso
• Complete Input Remapping of Mouse and Keyboard
• Smooth UV Interpolation on SDS Meshes
• Integrated Learning System
• Tool Pipe – Enabling new levels of control on falloff and tool customization

Key Sculpting Features

• Multi-Res sculpting based on Pixar Subdivision surfaces
• Mesh-based sculpting
• Image-based sculpting
• Push tool
• Smooth tool
• Carve tool
• Flatten tool
• Fold tool
• Inflate tool
• Smudge tool
• Move tool
• Tangent Pinch tool
• Spin tool
• Emboss tool
• Image ink (sculpt with image)
• Brushes and brush editor/browser
• Spline-based strokes are supported

Key painting & texturing features

• Advanced Procedural Textures
• Control micropolygon tessellation via any one or combination of multiple texture layers
• Real-Time Bump Map Painting
• Procedural Painting
• Parametric ink leverages 3D data to modulate attributes
• Control painting tools with modeling falloffs
• Jitter Nozzle
• Image Based Brushes and Inks
• Shader tree

Key Animation features

modo is not considered a true character animation system, but has many animation capabilities.

• Animate virtually any item's properties (geometry, camera, lights)
• Graph editor with animation curve manipulation
• Auto key option
• Time system can be frames, seconds, SMPTE or film code
• Morph target animation
• Reads MDD files from other animation systems
• Track View
• Inverse kinematics
• Channel linking
• Channel modifiers
• Dynamic parenting

Key rendering features

• Global Illumination
• Physical Sun and Sky
• Advanced Procedural Textures
• Control micropolygon tessellation via any one or combination of multiple texture layers
• Control painting tools with modeling falloffs
• Displacement Rendering
• Interactive Renderer Preview
• Orthographic Rendering
• IEEE Floating Point Accuracy
• Transparency (can vary with Absorption Distance)
• Subsurface scattering
• Anisotropic Blurred Reflections
• Instance Rendering
• Render Baking to Color and Normal Maps
• True Lens Distortion
• Physically Based Shading Model
• Fresnel effects
• Motion Blur
• Bloom
• Depth of Field
• Fully threaded (up to 16 threads)
• IES (photometric) light support
• Walkthrough mode provides steady GI solution over range of frames
• Network Rendering on up to 50 systems (no limit on number of cores)
• Numerous render outputs

modo once included imageSynth, a plugin for creating seamless textures in Adobe Photoshop CS1 or later. This bundle ended with the release of modo 301. Luxology has announced that the imageSynth plugin for Photoshop has been retired.^[3]

Books

• The Official Luxology modo Guide by Dan Ablan ISBN 1-59863-068-7 (October 2006)
• Le Mans C9 Experience by Andy Brown (video-based modo tutorials) (January 2007)
• Sports Shoe Tutorials by Andy Brown (video-based modo tutorials) (March 2007)
• Wrist Watch Tutorials by Andy Brown (video-based modo tutorials) (April 2007)
• modo 301 Signature Courseware DVD by Dan Ablan (October 2007)
• Seahorse (sculpting) Tutorial by Andy Brown (video-based modo tutorials) (August 2007)
• The Alley Tutorial by Andy Brown (game asset creation) (October 2007)
• modo in Focus Tutorials by Andy Brown (November 2007) Introductory videos and 30 day trial version
• Real World modo: The Authorized Guide: In the Trenches with modo by Wes McDermott (Paperback) (September 2009)

References

1. ^ Modo – What Lightwave Should Have Become
2. ^ @luxology on Twitter - January 26, 2010
3. ^ http://forums.luxology.com/discussion/topic.aspx?id=54392

External links

• Luxology website
• MODO Authorized Distributor in Indonesia