Modo (stylized as MODO, and originally modo) is a
polygon
In geometry, a polygon () is a plane figure that is described by a finite number of straight line segments connected to form a closed ''polygonal chain'' (or ''polygonal circuit''). The bounded plane region, the bounding circuit, or the two toge ...
and
subdivision surface
In the field of 3D computer graphics, a subdivision surface (commonly shortened to SubD surface) is a curved surface represented by the specification of a coarser polygon mesh and produced by a recursive algorithmic method. The curved surface, t ...
modeling,
sculpting
Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. Sculpture is the three-dimensional art work which is physically presented in the dimensions of height, width and depth. It is one of the plastic arts. Durable sc ...
, 3D painting,
animation
Animation is a method by which image, still figures are manipulated to appear as Motion picture, moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent cel, celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited ...
and rendering package developed by
Luxology, LLC
Luxology, LLC is a software company that creates 3D computer graphics software, 3D software products. One of its primary products is the 3D art software modo (software), modo.
In September 2012, the company merged with The Foundry Visionmongers, ...
, which is now merged with and known as
Foundry
A foundry is a factory that produces metal castings. Metals are cast into shapes by melting them into a liquid, pouring the metal into a mold, and removing the mold material after the metal has solidified as it cools. The most common metals pr ...
. The program incorporates features such as
n-gons and edge weighting, and runs on
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
,
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...
and
macOS
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...
platforms.
History
Modo was created by the same core group of software engineers that previously created the pioneering 3D application
LightWave 3D
LightWave 3D is a 3D computer graphics program developed by NewTek. It has been used in films, television, motion graphics, digital matte painting, visual effects, video game development, product design, architectural visualizations, virt ...
, originally developed on the
Amiga
Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphi ...
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
Mountain View is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States. Named for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains, it has a population of 82,376.
Mountain View was integral to the early history and growth of Silicon Valley, and is the ...
.
In 2001, senior management at
NewTek
NewTek, Inc. is a San Antonio, Texas-based hardware and software company that produces live and post-production video tools and visual imaging software for personal computers. The company was founded in 1985 in Topeka, Kansas, United States, by T ...
(makers of LightWave) and their key LightWave engineers disagreed regarding the notion for a complete rewrite of LightWave's work-flow and technology. 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
SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques) is an annual conference on computer graphics (CG) organized by the ACM SIGGRAPH, starting in 1974. The main conference is held in North America; SIGGRAPH Asia ...
2004 and released in September of the same year. In April 2005, the high-end visual effects studio
Digital Domain
Digital Domain is an American visual effects and digital production company based in Playa Vista, Los Angeles, California. The company is known for creating digital imagery for feature films, advertising and games from its locations in Californ ...
integrated Modo into their production pipeline. Other studios to adopt Modo include
Pixar
Pixar Animation Studios (commonly known as Pixar () and stylized as P I X A R) is an American computer animation studio known for its critically and commercially successful computer animated feature films. It is based in Emeryville, Californi ...
,
Industrial Light & Magic
Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) is an American motion picture visual effects company that was founded on May 26, 1975 by George Lucas. It is a division of the film production company Lucasfilm, which Lucas founded, and was created when he began pro ...
,
Zoic Studios
Zoic Studios is an American visual effects company based in Culver City, California. They specialize in visual effects for feature films, episodic television, commercials, video games, advertising design, and interactive online media.
History ...
,
id Software
id Software LLC () is an American video game developer based in Richardson, Texas. It was founded on February 1, 1991, by four members of the computer company Softdisk: programmers John Carmack and John Romero, game designer Tom Hall, and ar ...
,
Eden FX
Eden may refer to:
*Garden of Eden, the "garden of God" described in the Book of Genesis
Places and jurisdictions
Canada
* Eden, Ontario
* Eden High School
Middle East
* Eden, Lebanon, a city and former bishopric
* Camp Eden, Iraq
Oc ...
,
Studio ArtFX,
The Embassy Visual Effects
The Embassy is a visual effects studio located in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The Embassy is known for its photo-realistic visual effects work on commercials and more recently, features.
The studio completed a number of visual effects sho ...
,
Naked Sky Entertainment
Naked Sky Entertainment was an independent game development studio based in Los Angeles. They are a licensed developer for Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and iOS.
Games
*''RoboBlitz'' (2006)
*'' Star Trek DAC'' (2009)
*''MicroBot
...
and
Spinoff Studios.
Modo 201 was the winner of the
Apple Design Awards
The Apple Design Awards (ADAs) is an event hosted by Apple Inc. at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference. The purpose of the event is to recognize the best and most innovative Macintosh
The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a fa ...
for Best Use of
Mac OS X
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...
Graphics for 2006. In October 2006, Modo also won "Best 3D/Animation Software" from
MacUser
''MacUser'' was a monthly (formerly biweekly) computer magazine published by Dennis Publishing Ltd. and licensed by Felden in the UK. It ceased publication in 2015.
In 1985 Felix Dennis’ Dennis Publishing, the creators of MacUser in the UK, l ...
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
Iron Man is a superhero appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. The character was co-created by writer and editor Stan Lee, developed by scripter Larry Lieber, and designed by artists Don Heck and Jack Kirby. The charact ...
, and
Wall-E
''WALL-E'' (stylized with an interpunct as ''WALL·E'') is a 2008 American computer-animated science fiction film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures. It was directed and co-written by Andrew Stanton, pro ...
''.
Workflow
Modo's workflow differs substantially from many other mainstream 3D applications. While
Maya
Maya may refer to:
Civilizations
* Maya peoples, of southern Mexico and northern Central America
** Maya civilization, the historical civilization of the Maya peoples
** Maya language, the languages of the Maya peoples
* Maya (Ethiopia), a populat ...
and
3ds Max
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 capabil ...
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
Radial is a geometric term of location which may refer to:
Mathematics and Direction
* Vector (geometric), a line
* Radius, adjective form of
* Radial distance, a directional coordinate in a polar coordinate system
* Radial set
* A bearing f ...
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
Linearity is the property of a mathematical relationship (''function'') that can be graphically represented as a straight line. Linearity is closely related to '' proportionality''. Examples in physics include rectilinear motion, the linear r ...
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
An airbrush is a small, air-operated tool that atomizes and sprays various media, most often paint but also ink and dye, and foundation. Spray painting developed from the airbrush and is considered to employ a type of airbrush.
History
U ...
, 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
Dispersion may refer to:
Economics and finance
*Dispersion (finance), a measure for the statistical distribution of portfolio returns
*Price dispersion, a variation in prices across sellers of the same item
*Wage dispersion, the amount of variatio ...
, stereoscopic rendering, fresnel effects,
subsurface scattering
Subsurface scattering (SSS), also known as subsurface light transport (SSLT), is a mechanism of light transport in which light that penetrates the surface of a translucent object is scattered by interacting with the material and exits the surfa ...
, blurry refractions (e.g. frosted glass),
volumetric lighting
Volumetric lighting, also known as "God rays", is a technique used in 3D computer graphics to add lighting effects to a rendered scene. It allows the viewer to see beams of light shining across the environment. Examples of volumetric lighting ...
(smokey bar effect), and Pixar-patented Deep Shadows.
Select features
* Tool Pipe for creating customized tools
* Scripting (
Perl
Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offici ...
,
Python
Python may refer to:
Snakes
* Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia
** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia
* Python (mythology), a mythical serpent
Computing
* Python (pro ...
,
Lua
Lua or LUA may refer to:
Science and technology
* Lua (programming language)
* Latvia University of Agriculture
* Last universal ancestor, in evolution
Ethnicity and language
* Lua people, of Laos
* Lawa people, of Thailand sometimes referred t ...
)
* Customizable User Interface
* Extensive file input and output
Key modeling features
* N-gon modeling (subdivided polygons with >4 points) and
* Mesh Instancing
*
Retopology Retopology (or retopo) is a step in the 3D modeling process where an object's polygonal mesh is modified or recreated to obtain a cleaner layout while maintaining nearly the same physical shape of the model. Owing to its complexity, retopology is c ...
Tools
* A powerful sculpting toolset
* Procedural modeling with "Mesh Operators"
* MeshFusion (Non destructive subD boolean operations)
Key animation features
* Animate virtually any item's properties (geometry, camera, lights)
* Layerable deformers
*
Morph target animation
Morph target animation, per-vertex animation, shape interpolation, shape keys, or blend shapes is a method of 3D computer animation used together with techniques such as skeletal animation. In a morph target animation, a "deformed" version of a m ...
* Rigging with full-body
Inverse kinematics
In computer animation and robotics, inverse kinematics is the mathematical process of calculating the variable joint parameters needed to place the end of a kinematic chain, such as a robot manipulator or animation character's skeleton, in a g ...
* Dynamic parenting
Key rendering features
* Global Illumination
* Physical Sun and Sky
* Displacement Rendering
* Interactive Render Preview
* IEEE Floating Point Accuracy
*
Subsurface scattering
Subsurface scattering (SSS), also known as subsurface light transport (SSLT), is a mechanism of light transport in which light that penetrates the surface of a translucent object is scattered by interacting with the material and exits the surfa ...
* 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
Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. for Microsoft Windows, Windows and macOS. It was originally created in 1988 by Thomas Knoll, Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, the software has become the indu ...
CS1 or later. This bundle ended with the release of Modo 301. Luxology has announced that the imageSynth plugin for Photoshop has been retired.
References
Further reading
*
*
External links
*
Luxology's Modo 501 at GDC 2011ro
Intel.com
{{3D software
3D graphics software
Global illumination software
3D animation software
3D computer graphics software for Linux
Proprietary commercial software for Linux