modo 601

modo®

modo delivers character animation, dynamics, retopology modeling and rendering advances, plus a wide variety of workflow enhancements. We hope to show you how modo is the uniquely creative tool for artists and designers.

Character Animation and Deformers

modo's powerful animation capabilities include new character animation and rig- ging tools including an easy-to-use Pose Tool and a flexible system of layerable deformers. A system of Actors with assignable Poses and Actions speeds the animation process.

Pose Tool

modo lets you create poses for characters without complex rigging. Start with any mesh that has an attached skeleton and easily manipulate it into the shape you want. Use the Pose Tool to animate your characters, as a prototyping tool for designing character rigs, or simply to pose models for sculpting and mod- eling operations.

Pose Space Sculpting

You can directly sculpt a mesh even at the stage of setting up a character in modo, providing an exceptionally flexible environ- ment for animating characters.

Deformers

An extensive system of Deformers in modo provides a variety of ways to modify the shape of animated items down to the vertex level. Multiple Deformers can be readily combined and the results are normalized for a uniform and balanced result. modo's uniquely powerful implemen- tation allows you to layer deformation effects, one on top of another. This opens up a range of possible deformation behaviors that typical skeleton-based systems can't easily achieve.

Falloffs as Deformers

As of modo, Falloffs are not just for affecting the spatial extent of modeling operations, they can be used to attenuate the influence of Deformers while animating. This interaction of Deformers and Falloffs provides tremendous control within animation rigs.

Dynamics

Rigid and soft body dynamics, based on the Bullet Physics LibraryTM engine, are now a standard part of modo.

Rigid Body Dynamics

Rigid Bodies can now respond to collisions and be affected by a variety of forces, such as gravity and motors, using recoil Dynamics in modo.

Soft Body Dynamics

Soft Body effects, like flapping capes and draping tableclothes, can now be generated automatically us- ing recoil Dynamics in modo.

Modeling

The world's most powerful polygon and Subdivision Surface modeler is now even more powerful and ef- ficient to use. Here we explore some of modo's modeling improvements.

Dedicated Re-Topology Modeling Tools and Viewport

modo has a focused environment for re-topology modeling which combines a specialized user interface with new tools that make it easier than ever to cre- ate clean geometry on top of a background mesh.

Topology Pen Tool

The new Topology Pen is the Swiss Army Knife® of topology modeling. Within a single tool you can drag, weld, extend and create new geometry. Using tool-specific hot keys, you can easily drag components or edge loops, duplicate components and loops, slide edges and remove com- ponents on the fly. Additionally, the tool can automatically create UV data as it creates new geometry. This single tool is an incredible accelerator to the topology modeling process.

New Geometry Constraint “Point” Mode

This new modeling option constrains vertices to their closest position on a background mesh during model- ing operations to further facilitate re-topology model- ing. This option is present on tools such as Add Loop, Loop Slice and Edge Slide.

Soft Selection Falloff

modo has a new Soft Selection Falloff that grabs both the selected area and a variable zone outside the selection. The Falloff implicitly selects elements around selection and sets influence weights based on the distance from the closest ele- ment inside the radius. The Soft Selection Falloff also has a “Use Connectivity” option which considers surface connectivity, so that unwanted areas remain unselected.

Lazy Selection

Lazy Selection is introduced for vertices, edges and polygons – so that you need not be positioned over
a geometric element to select it. The closest element from the mouse cursor position is selected despite the selection hit size. Lazy Selection works great in silhouette mode; you can be outside of the mesh and still select elements easily on the profile. It also works very well in conjunction with the new Topology Pen tool for extending the outer edges of a mesh without having to precisely pick the edges first.

Vertex Map Painting

modo has always been progressive with how it deals with weight maps... allowing you to set up weights and add or remove points/ polygons all the while keeping all your weighting intact. Now you can use modo’s paint system to paint, scale, erase and smooth vertex (weight) maps on your mesh. This works just like the other brush tools in modo so there is virtually no learning curve if you already know how to use modo’s existing painting and sculpting tools. Weighting can now be added to weight “containers” that allow for weighting to be stored at the item level. This gives users a more streamlined approach for weighting multiple meshes as well as making it much easier to build a rig and re-use it in other scenes.

Silhouette View

You can now display items as silhouettes in order to readily adjust the outer profile of an object as well as to visually isolate items in profile when modeling, posing or animating in modo.

Enhanced Render View

The Render View in modo has evolved into a multi-function environ- ment for rendering, baking, image viewing, image processing and perform- ing side-by-side image comparisons. The enhanced Render View in modo provides a focused environment for achieving final rendering results.

3D Paint Performance

The Paint Stroke Engine in modo is both faster and of better quality. This provides a more fluid expe- rience when painting and yields smoother results.

Render Booleans

You can now use meshes or other 3D shapes to visu- ally subtract out parts of your scene at render time, revealing interior portions of your models without hav- ing to manually remove or hide intervening geometry.

Sky Portals

Sky Portals offer an intuitive way to render interior spaces by letting light pass through windows or skylights from the surrounding environment. Sky Portals funnel the out- side light into your scene for natural results.

Rounded Edge Shader

You can now render the hard edges on your model with a softer, rounded appearance that emphasizes edge highlights – for more realistic looking mechani- cal designs or architectural elements.

Camera Clipping (By Surface or Material)

Camera Clipping lets you truncate the view through a camera up to a specified clipping distance. This new tool provides an interior cross-section that can be animated to gradually reveal or hide internal struc- ture and detail.

Render Passes

Render Passes let you easily and automatically render scenes with alternate settings such as: different materials for color studies, different item visibility for post-render compositing, or different pixel resolutions for film/video, web and print applications. You have complete control over what attributes of your scene are rendered.

Preview Renderer Improvements

The Preview Renderer can now be set to render at full resolution so that you can employ it for final image or movie production. Previews can now show motion blur and volumetrics too.

Hair Shader

A new Hair Shader with a rich, but accessible, range of controls is provided. Based on An Artist-Friendly Hair Shading System, the Hair Shader simulates light scattering and reflections through many hair fibers within a volume of hair.

Cel Shader

A Cel Shader is included for toon or comic-book style rendered results. This Shader provides a wide range of controls over diffuse, specular and reflection bands, plus the ability to draw edges.

Volumes, Replicators and Particle Clouds

You can now replicate vast numbers of objects across sur- faces with greater ease and variability, and paint and import particle clouds to drive the location of objects. Volumetric rendering has been added to modo, letting you create blobby objects and cottony materials like clouds and smoke.

RealFlowTM Support

modo lets you load RealFlow particles into modo and render them with replicators, volumetrics, and sprites. The RealFlow BIN format is a simple, com- plete format that provides an excellent way to get particle data into modo.

Blobs

You can create gooey, waxy and viscous shapes using the new Blob items in modo. These implicit surfaces can be textured, and you have control over sizing, as well as globbiness/surface cohesion, to create a variety of interesting shapes. You can control where the Blobs appear by attaching them to a mesh or any point source. Blobs are fully integrated into the rendering pipeline – they are rendered just like any other surface – therefore Blobs work with features such as global illulmination, disper- sion, blurry reflections, and motion blur.

Load these scene formats into modo 601

• Luxology Scene LXO
• SolidWorks 2012, 2011 and 2010 Model sldprt, sldasm*
• LightWave Object LWO2, LWOB
• Autodesk DXF
• Autodesk FBX
• Autodesk 3DS
• Videoscape GEO
• Adobe Illustrator EPS, AI
• Adobe Photoshop PSD
• Wavefront OBJ
• COLLADA DAE
• MDD (animation format)
• Alembic

*SolidWorks import is for Windows 32–bit and 64–bit only

Load these image formats into modo 601

• Flexible Precision image FLX Targa TGA
• Windows BMP
• Compuserve GIF
• Radiance High Dynamic Range HDR
• Adobe Photoshop PSD
• EULumDat LDT
• Radiance High Dynamic Range HDR
• JPEG 2000 JP2
• JPEG JPG
• Portable Network Graphic PNG
• SGI (SGI RGB RGBA BW)
• Tagged image file format TIF
• ies IES
• OpenEXR EXR

modo 601 support for other file formats

• modo 601 can load RealFlow Particle data (bin) file, but not from the traditional File menu.
• modo 601 can also record OpenGL animation to movie or images.

General System Requirements

• 2GB RAM minimum
• 2GB available hard disk space for full content installation
• OpenGL 2.0 accelerated graphics, at least 1280x800 resolution
• Internet connection required for product activation and to access online videos
• Mouse or pointing device, including pressure sensitive tablets or 3DCONNEXION 3D mouse