Modo doesn’t try to be all things to all people. There are no particle systems for smoke or fire. There are no soft body dynamics for cloth or fleshy jiggling. There is no character animation and morphing animation features. But, unless I’m mistaken, most Microfilmmakers aren’t doing character animation in the first place. What we’re looking for are ways to easily augment our version of reality when required. This is where modo 401 shines brightly. In fact, Luxology has made it even easier to create scenes right out of the box by including a generous amount of real-world 3D objects, light rigs, textures and more to help users start inventing 3D environments immediately.
Modo’s original claim to fame was its most excellent modeling tools. Easy to use with nicely nuanced selection tools make creating or modifying geometry a pleasure instead of a chore. These have received some subtle improvements. A nice edition in this area is the ability for most of the tools to support per vertex collision with geometry. This is an invaluable capability when modifying high resolution meshes into something more manageable. Logical edge selection and selection expansion is outstanding. While creating hard surface models is elegant and straightforward, creating organic objects with the mesh painting/sculpting tools is easy, as well.
A related feature to modeling is UV mapping/unwrapping - that is, defining how the textures, especially painted textures, relate to the 3D mesh. 401 UV operations have received some nice refinements and smoothed off some of the rougher edges that were in 302. Users can now save “pins” or constraint points that are used when relaxing the geometry and then use them later without reselecting them.
The new preview/real-time rendering doesn’t require users to imagine what their scene will look like and then do a sample render to verify. Thanks to some wonderful advancements in it’s OpenGL capabilities, modo presents near render quality previews while you work on your scene. So, if you have a background image that you are matching, you can see how things will look right now.
If you have multiple computers in your studio and want to create a render farm to accelerate your renders, I’ve found no easier set up than modo.
Modo 401 is just really nice to use.
