Modo (software)

Last updated

MODO (software)
Developer(s) The Foundry Visionmongers [1]
Stable release
16v2 [2] / 21 June 2022;16 months ago (2022-06-21)
Operating system Windows, Linux, macOS
Type 3D computer graphics
License Trialware
Website www.foundry.com/products/modo

Modo (stylized as MODO, and originally modo) [3] is a polygon and subdivision surface modeling, sculpting, 3D painting, animation and rendering package developed by Luxology, LLC, which is now merged with and known as Foundry. The program incorporates features such as n-gons and edge weighting, and runs on Microsoft Windows, Linux and macOS platforms.

Contents

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, senior management at NewTek (makers of LightWave) and their key LightWave engineers disagreed regarding the notion for a complete rewrite of LightWave's work-flow and technology. [4] [ self-published source? ] 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 some of the LightWave programming team members (Arnie Cachelin, Matt Craig, Greg Duquesne, Yoshiaki Tazaki).

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.

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 was used in the production of feature films such as Stealth , Ant Bully , Iron Man, and Wall-E .

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. [5]

Action centers

Modo allows an artist to choose the "pivot point" of a tool or action in realtime simply by clicking somewhere. [6] 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.

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.

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 which renders to final quality if left alone. 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. As of version 801, node-based shading is a part of the work flow as well.

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. [7]

Select features

Key modeling features

  • N-gon modeling (subdivided polygons with >4 points) and
  • Mesh Instancing
  • Retopology Tools
  • A powerful sculpting toolset
  • Procedural modeling with "Mesh Operators"
  • MeshFusion (Non destructive subD boolean operations)

Key animation features

Key rendering features

  • Global Illumination
  • Physical Sun and Sky
  • Displacement Rendering
  • Interactive Render Preview
  • IEEE Floating Point Accuracy
  • Subsurface scattering
  • Instance Rendering
  • Physically Based Shading Model
  • Motion Blur
  • Volumetric rendering
  • Depth of Field
  • Network Rendering
  • 3d paint toolset

Modo once included imageSynth, a Plug-in 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. [8]

Related Research Articles

The RenderMan Interface Specification, or RISpec in short, is an open API developed by Pixar Animation Studios to describe three-dimensional scenes and turn them into digital photorealistic images. It includes the RenderMan Shading Language.

Autodesk 3ds Max, formerly 3D Studio and 3D Studio Max, is a professional 3D computer graphics program for making 3D animations, models, games and images. It is developed and produced by Autodesk Media and Entertainment. It has modeling capabilities and a flexible plugin architecture and must be used on the Microsoft Windows platform. It is frequently used by video game developers, many TV commercial studios, and architectural visualization studios. It is also used for movie effects and movie pre-visualization. 3ds Max features shaders, dynamic simulation, particle systems, radiosity, normal map creation and rendering, global illumination, a customizable user interface, and its own scripting language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cinema 4D</span> 3D software

Cinema 4D is a 3D software suite developed by the German company Maxon.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LightWave 3D</span> 3D computer graphics program

LightWave 3D is a 3D computer graphics program developed by LightWave Digital. It has been used in films, television, motion graphics, digital matte painting, visual effects, video game development, product design, architectural visualizations, virtual production, music videos, pre-visualizations and advertising.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wings 3D</span>

Wings 3D is a free and open-source subdivision modeler inspired by Nendo and Mirai from Izware. Wings 3D is named after the winged-edge data structure it uses internally to store coordinate and adjacency data, and is commonly referred to by its users simply as Wings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Houdini (software)</span> 3D animation software

Houdini is a 3D animation software application developed by Toronto-based SideFX, who adapted it from the PRISMS suite of procedural generation software tools.

The Advanced Visualizer (TAV), a 3D graphics software package, was the flagship product of Wavefront Technologies from the 1980s until the 1990s.

Aladdin4D is a computer program for modeling and rendering three-dimensional graphics and animations, currently running on AmigaOS and macOS platforms. A-EON Technology Ltd owns the rights and develops current and future versions of Aladdin4D for AmigaOS, MorphOS & AROS. All other platforms including macOS, iPadOS, iOS, Linux & Windows are developed by DiscreetFX.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ZBrush</span> Digital sculpting tool

Pixologic ZBrush is a digital sculpting tool that combines 3D/2.5D modeling, texturing and painting. It uses a proprietary "pixol" technology which stores lighting, color, material, orientation and depth information for the points making up all objects on the screen. The main difference between ZBrush and more traditional modeling packages is that it is more akin to traditional sculpting.

Strata Design 3D CX is a commercial 3D modeling, rendering and animation program developed in St. George, Utah by Corastar, Inc. dba Strata Software as the successor to StrataVision 3D. It is an all-purpose 3D modeling application targeted at the illustration/multimedia market.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">E-on Vue</span> 3D landscape generation software from e-on software

Vue is a software tool for world generation by e-on software with support for many visual effects, animations and various other features. The tool has been used in several feature-length movies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">3D computer graphics</span> Graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data

3D computer graphics, sometimes called CGI, 3-D-CGI or three-dimensional computer graphics, are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data that is stored in the computer for the purposes of performing calculations and rendering digital images, usually 2D images but sometimes 3D images. The resulting images may be stored for viewing later or displayed in real time.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Softimage 3D</span> 3D graphics programme that preceded SoftimageXSI

Softimage|3D was a high-end 3D graphics application developed by Softimage, Co., which was used predominantly in the film, broadcasting, gaming, and advertising industries for the production of 3D animation. It was superseded by Softimage XSI in 2000.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Computer graphics</span> Graphics created using computers

Computer graphics deals with generating images and art with the aid of computers. Today, computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, digital art, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. A great deal of specialized hardware and software has been developed, with the displays of most devices being driven by computer graphics hardware. It is a vast and recently developed area of computer science. The phrase was coined in 1960 by computer graphics researchers Verne Hudson and William Fetter of Boeing. It is often abbreviated as CG, or typically in the context of film as computer generated imagery (CGI). The non-artistic aspects of computer graphics are the subject of computer science research.

3D computer graphics software refers to programs used to create 3D computer-generated imagery.

Maxwell Render is an unbiased 3D render engine, developed by Next Limit Technologies in Madrid, Spain. This stand-alone software is used in the film, animation, and VFX industry, as well as in architectural and product design visualization. It offers various plug-ins for 3D/CAD and post production applications.

iClone is a real-time 3D animation and rendering software program. Real-time playback is enabled by using a 3D videogame engine for instant on-screen rendering.

Alembic is an interchangeable computer graphics file format developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks and Industrial Light & Magic. It was announced at SIGGRAPH 2011, and has been widely adopted across the industry by visual effects and animation professionals.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Art of Illusion</span>

Art of Illusion is a free software, and open source software package for making 3D graphics.

References

  1. ↑ "Foundry and Luxology Merge". fxGuide. fxGuide.com LLC. 25 September 2012.
  2. ↑ "Modo New Releases". foundry.com. The Foundry Visionmongers . Retrieved 16 August 2022.
  3. ↑ Cohen, Peter (10 June 2005). "Luxology modo ready for Intel switch". Macworld . IDG. Archived from the original on 28 January 2013. Retrieved 22 February 2012.
  4. ↑ "Modo – What Lightwave Should Have Become". The Foundry Forums. Self-published. 21 June 2007. Archived from the original on 15 February 2009.[ self-published source? ]
  5. ↑ "3D Modeling Software" . Retrieved 27 April 2022.
  6. ↑ Perry, Todd Sheridan (11 August 2008). "Luxology's modo 302". Animation Magazine. Retrieved 20 July 2022.
  7. ↑ "Luxology modo 401 Review: modo now has a preset library, packed with models, textures, environments and materials. - Software and Services - Graphics & Publishing - PC World Australia". www.pcworld.idg.com.au. Retrieved 20 July 2022.
  8. ↑ Tracy, David (23 February 2011). "ImageSynth has been retired". The Foundry Forums. Luxology. Archived from the original on 16 August 2011. Retrieved 9 May 2011.

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.