PolySculpt

I forgot to post about this previously: I switched to modo 401.

I had the opportunity to have a free copy, thanks to Brad Pebber, the Luxology CEO. As you know, with GoZ that we have with ZBrush 3.2, we have now a strong connection with modo and ZBrush (but also C4D and Maya). I’m really happy with our bridge since it helps me a lot in my work and tests!

Even without this opportunity, I would have buy it as the upgrade price was only $295 before the release of 401.

Oh, for the 401 users, don’t forget to update to 401 SP1 and if you use GoZ you will need to reinstall it!

I’m continuing my self learning of modo 302 while waiting the launch of the 401. I still have several troubles and spending a lot of times in things that I’m thinking should be more easier to do. I also installed several scripts to enhance my workflow.

I think that I’m very negative in my feedback about modo, because right now I’m on the modeling part and because of my strong background in this task. To be honest, I deeply think that modo is far behind than Amapi 8 and Hexagon 2 on the polymodeling tasks but, and this but is important, modo offer a lot of customization, a lot of scripts to add the tools that you don’t have, something which was simply impossible in Amapi or Hexagon. When you start to know better the modo toolset, it become easier, but still far from being easy and productive.

But I started to work on the shaders, maps (not visible yet), and UVs and for this part, modo really rocks (even if the shader tree is not really understandable at the first glance. Where is the node view?? ) And I don’t speak of the render speed. How easy is it to setup the shaders when you can have a live preview on your model, changing the lights and a couple of seconds seeing the result on your screen.

This is the evolution of the same WIP, still progressing. Some parts have been hidden as they were the resulting of tests

I forgot to say that I started to work on the pivot point to have some easier pose for my robot

Well well well… Not a lot of free time recently for my modo learning, but I when I can, I do. But, as I said previously, “hell”, it’s hard… Some simple feedback from my way to use and understand it. Positive first, negative after:

Positive:

• The UI is very flexible and allows me to setup my views as I want and insert scripts where I need. It’s possible to create new pie menu, new tabs and others in an editor which is great. Same for the shortcuts!
• Very nice display properties and presets. The Normal Maps are perfectly displayed, it’s really cool!
• A lot of modeling tools, which have most of the time a lot of option for different results. It will be long to learn all of them and what can be done, but it brings a lot of power to the software.
• modo is now more a complete 3D software : it offers a good UV editor and a fantastic rendering engine, not only a simple modeler like modo 101.
• Speaking of rendering, I’m really impress by the speed of its engine. The preview render is a great tool to do the material and lighting setup. you can see in a couple of second a good preview without waiting longs minutes to see a result. Very productive. I don’t have the fastest computers on earth, but I guess it must be excellent on high end computers! When comparing to Carrara, no way to come back to this software. Just the blurry reflections and the SSS rendering speed put Carrara directly on its knees. And if I do the comparison with Mental Ray, modo provide very nice results without spending hours in the rendering setup. I don’t need to program advanced shaders, I just need to use them. Then I think with time, and modo 501 with I hope CA tools, I will stop using 3DSMax completely!
• Uvs… our friends! I’m currently using modo for my UVs. It have some good tools. Perhaps not as good as UV Layout, but its unwrap and relax are pretty good. I need to spend more time on it since I still have some troubles of unwrapping just parts of an object: I need to hide what I don’t want to unwrap. no way to use a selection or a material?
• Tons of “maps”: UV maps, Morph maps, vertex maps, weightmaps… damn, that’s great! Multiple UVs in a click, easy morph targets easily animated, it’s really cool!
• With the Items manager, you can create hierarchy between the meshes which is in some cases, very interesting. By creating groups, you can create what could be layers in other softwares, which is useful for complex scene!

Negative:

• The workflow is tricky as you have to always switch from a selection mode to a tool, and when the tool is done, drop it to do another selection. To quit the current tool, you have to hit Space bar or pick another tool or switch to a selection mode. If you click in an empty part of the scene, you don’t unselect or quit the tool. In fact, you are using the tool since most of them are using the mouse click-drag to modify a value. It’s interesting, but I think it shouldn’t be the default behavior. Then, the trick is to go in the Pipe menu and activate the “See through” function… for all the tools as its a way to customize the tools. Perhaps a general preference exist, but I missed it.
• These damn manipulators oups… Action Center: you have a lot of different present (selection, origin, automatic, etc) or you can even create your own by choosing its position and its orientation but you don’t have by default, a manipulator that is by default in all other 3D Softwares : centered on the current selection and aligned to the universe axis. Then you can build it (but how can I save it as my default one? I must be able to do it, but I have to find how…). Well, great! Well, no. If you do a click by mistake on another part of your scene, it will move your manipulator where you clicked, and it is not undoable. Then you must quit the current tool (lets say Transform) and pick it again. But the good point about this freely movable manipulator it that it allows you to put your pivot point where you want to do some specific operations, which is great. See Through will disable this possibility. I have to build two manipulators: one with See through and one without. And because of all these presets, these possibilities, I need sometime to switch one after the other to each Action center to find the good one. How productive…
• Falloff are nice… when you know how to use them! A lot of deformation can be made with them, but you need to master them first. I’m still looking for a simple soft selection one: you select a polygon to manipulate, and you will have a falloff which will affect the polygons around this selected polygon. You can do it with the  Element move Tool (T) and the right click, but I didn’t find with the default transform tools.
• Working Symmetry is working only when your model center is aligned with the center of the universe. I though that it has been updated in 30x to work based on the object axis. I may have miss something here as it is now a basic feature in all modern softwares!
• No selection means all selected. It’s the default behavior of modo and for some tools, it’s great. But for other like Edge Extend (Z), it’s a nightmare. I had several discussion with that with one of the modo developer who told me that it’s like that, because of the default modo behavior. I told him that perhaps it’s like that, but I don’t see a single reason to have the ability in the Edge Extend tool (duplicating all the edges other themselves, which generate a fucked topology, then, killing the model)
• The shader creation is not really intuitive. i have to explore more this part, but it lacks some visual feedback of the current edited shader. A node editor would be a greaaat addition to modo!
• The item management is not usual for me. You have an empty mesh, you add your geometry inside, even separate geometry which are not connected. If you want to have another object, then you have to create another empty mesh and put your stuff inside. Etc.
• Who loves this trackball 3D navigation??
• As said in the positive part that the UI is flexible… but in fact, I think it’s too much flexible and sometimes, you create floating menus, duplicating ones and you are lost.

Tools/features missing: I just added this part as someone may help me to find them or some workaround!

• An Extrusion/sweep/bevel tool “a la” Hexagon/Amapi, to create fast extrusions in a set of clicks. You can pick the Bevel tool and use the Shift key to continue using it, but it’s tricky in some tools.
• A way to convert an edge selection to a polyline and then convert it to a pipe/tube
• Surface tools !!!

Conclusion of this today’s post: Modo looks for me more and more powerful, but it also looks more and more to be a “technical” software, which is for me, opposite to an artistic ready to use software. You need to learn a bunch of things before starting to enjoy it, which is very frustating. I start to enjoy it and the more I spend on it, the more I think that I did the good choice. But why some simple things are not by default in the software and you need to know so much things for so simple tasks? I’m far to be as productive with it than Amapi 8 or Hexagon for modeling tasks and I guess that I won’t be as productive with it, even after years of modo work, but everything else outside the modeling part do wonderfully the job! This is the progress of the small Robot

Next part of this learning  soon!

Why modo?

I bought modo 201 some time ago, because I was looking for an alternative modeler for Amapi and Hexagon because these software in a short future will “die”: Amapi 8 development has been stopped 1 month before its public beta, with less than 3 months of development to have a full product ready to be shipped, and Hexagon is no more developed by DAZ, or nearly not, except adding content specific stuff (well, let’s hope I’m wrong!)

I also needed a new render engine as an alternative of the also “dying” and restricted  Carrara, and too expensive 3DSMax (thanks for the license of my job!). Then modo was a good choice: company with a strong background in 3D, new architecture, full feature set Sub division modeler, very good UV editor, a killer renderer at a price that a freelance, a small company can afford. Another important point: finding resources. modo have a great community and Luxology, the editor, provides a lot of learning content, free or not.

But hell! It was and it’s still hard to learn modo and I’m far to be a beginner in 3D and with 3D modelers. But i’m still thinking that I did a good choice and I will post on my blog my progress, my learning and what I find weird or crazy in this package!

Because I  lack of free time and because I always have 2457 projects at the same time, I try to focus on a simple project which will makes me see all kind of features that modo 302 (my current version while waiting the release of  the 401): A simple robot, freely inspired from the movie Robots from Dreamworks. It will be basically some hard modeling, but with traditional modeling, copies, I will have to see how the hierachy and rigging (for the 401) will work, spend some time on UVs, work on the shaders and lighting and finally, the render. When all that stuff will be done, I will be able to start on the animation!

At the same time, I’m checking, redoing the videos I bought on their website to learn again and again. Then you will see a mix of various projects while I provide the feedback about how I’m progressing with this software

This is some screenshots, which will be commented later, in another post about my progress in modo:

And the beginning of an Austin Mini Coper (you may recognize the Digital Tutors tutorial

This is a video which I just found in an old directory of my hard drive. It will be a good video for the introduction post of my new blog!

Ths is a timelapse modeling of Gerogette, the caracter I modeled a long time ago, for the over illustration of the software Carrara 5. I have been modeled her with Hexagon 1.21.

Enjoy!