Harness the power of MeshFusion's advanced Boolean toolset more easily, thanks to a simplified schematic-free workflow that automatically creates and reorders the underlying tree structure as you cut, combine and intersect meshes. Cleaner output geometry and enhanced viewport visibility also contribute to a smoother, easier process, while an option to defer updates until mouse-up vastly improves performance as you edit.
Scanning a real-world object or creating a model in standalone sculpting programs can leave you with an unnecessarily dense mesh and poor topology. The new Auto-Retopo command creates clean mesh topology that follows the curvature of the input surface, at a density you specify. Use weight maps to concentrate the density where you need it most, and sketch guide curves on the surface to control the edge flow.
Modo's new assembly aliases let you collapse a set of operations and present them as a single entity with user-definable inputs—perfect for creating shareable presets to use with procedural modeling. Additionally, procedural modeling now supports various slicing and drilling commands. Clone and duplicate parts of the mesh in different ways, and use a wide range of previously unavailable selection commands to modify an existing selection.
Create and edit curves more intuitively with enhanced Bézier and spline curve tools. Highlights for Béziers include the ability to restore sharp corners from pairs of rounded corner CVs, and, conversely, the ability to round sharp corners via a draggable widget. Sharp corners now also maintain their sharpness when the curve is further edited, and there are several workflow improvements when selecting, editing and closing curves.
Deformers and mesh operations can take a long time to process, reducing animation playback performance and interrupting your creative flow. With new deformer caching, the deformations and operations can now be cached and held in memory, so can you scrub the timeline on a complex scene significantly faster. The cache even remains valid if you move the camera or edit materials.
Modo’s Preview renderer and Advanced viewport have both received significant performance improvements, while usability has also been improved for the Modo renderer by providing an optional global control for reflection, refraction and SSS settings. Meanwhile, the new ability to use arbitrary meshes as light sources offers an exciting new lighting workflow: you can easily represent difficult shapes, or use duplication tools to quickly populate a scene with lights.
Sometimes saving a few clicks, defining a sensible default or exposing a hidden setting makes more difference to your everyday workflow than the flashiest feature. With this in mind, we’ve improved Modo’s user interface for your asset creation workflow. Highlights include automatic component selection modes; a less visually distracting grid display; new options for workplanes; and new default options for drawing vertices and selected items.
With Modo’s procedural modeling system, you can model nondestructively. Each successive mesh operation—such as Bevel, Extrude, Merge, Reduce and Thicken—is added as a layer to a procedural stack, which you can modify, reorder, disable or delete at any time. View the mesh state at any point in the stack, with future operations shown as ghosted, and freeze the stack up till any chosen point for improved performance.
Selection operations let you control which mesh elements are affected by subsequent operations in the procedural stack. By default, selected elements are automatically added to a Select By Index operation; you can add or remove elements at any time. In addition, you can define other operations to select elements procedurally. Selection operations let you rig, animate and dynamically update selections as the input mesh changes.
Procedural modeling in Modo lets you easily create an almost infinite number of variations. For example, you could construct a procedural road, then easily change the number of lights, the road width, or the path the road follows. You can even use textures as modeling operation inputs; simply change the texture to achieve an entirely different effect, while all of the subsequent operations are still applied.
Modo’s procedural system lets you easily animate almost any parameter within the stack. Falloffs modulate the behaviour of tools within the stack, and you can animate their placement to create interesting effects. It’s now possible to modulate the effect of tools and deformers using a textured falloff; textures can be connected to the falloff directly in the schematic or in the mesh operation stack.
Modo’s procedural system makes it easy to style 3D text—adding thickness and bevels, for example—then change the input string or the font to create new variations. Text can also be rigged in the schematic view, letting you dynamically change the source text. Additionally, the text tool can now directly output Bézier curves that can be used to drive a new Curve Fill operation, providing an all-quad mesh.
Modo now offers B-Splines as an alternative to Bézier curves. A new procedural Curve Fill operation lets you fill a closed curve with quads, while a Curve Particle Generator makes creating and adjusting duplicated geometry along curves a breeze. There’s also a Curve Rebuild operation for resampling curves into evenly-spaced sets of points, a Lacing Geometry operation that extrudes a profile shape along a guided curve and more.
The advanced MeshFusion Boolean modeling toolset now offers better control of mesh topology and density for individual strips. In addition, you can now intuitively create, edit and analyze simple Fusion models in the schematic with extended support for drag-and-drop editing. Enhanced placement options let you easily place and fuse multiple copies of preset meshes. Procedurally modelled meshes can be used as inputs to MeshFusion.
Making a 2D shape accurately conform to a 3D mesh—when attaching a decorative stripe to a shoe, for example—is now a quick and easy process, thanks to a new UV Transform operation. In addition, a new UV Constraint lets you lock the position and rotation of objects to an arbitrary position on a 3D surface. Meanwhile, a new Push Influence deformer pushes geometry along its surface normal.
Develop looks for game assets that correspond to lighting and surface details in real-time game engines, with new physically-based material types mirroring the materials in Unreal Engine and Unity. Modo 10.0 also delivers enhancements to the advanced photorealistic viewport, and the ability to work with popular 3D game engine base shaders directly in Modo.
Modo’s baking workflow is now more automated and streamlined. New Bake Items let you store parameters for accessible reuse. Take settings from a Bake Item when preview and RayGL baking, then adjust and view the results before executing the final operation. The new Bake Wizard also streamlines baking setup while offering customizable output presets.
Export to game engines in a single step, with ready-made presets for Unreal and Unity, and the ability to create custom presets for additional engines. Assets now transfer between Modo and Unity or Unreal Editor 4 with materials intact, and meshes automatically triangulate on FBX export. Modo 10.0 also supports many common DDS image formats.
For artists creating content for real-time applications, the Games Tools layout centers around the everyday tasks of vertex normal editing, texture baking and exporting to game engines, while still providing quick access to modeling tools. A new First Person Shooter mode also lets you navigate your Modo scene as players would see it in-game.
Delivering better compatibility for real-time engines, a new FBX 2015 plug-in offers support for the widely-used FBX 2014 format. Export UV sets alphabetically and automatically apply linear color correction to vector maps in all loaded clips. FBX file animations can now be imported and merged onto items in the scene, or applied to actors as actions, while instances and replicators can now be exported to FBX.
Explicitly manipulate vertex normals to control shading smoothness on low-polygon assets, with a series of tools that let you select individual edges to be smoothed or unsmoothed, constructing a vertex normal map on the mesh. What’s more, in addition to generating tangent basis data suitable for use with normal maps in Unreal, we’ve added the ability to create data suitable for use in both Unity and Source.
A new wizard makes creating UDIM image sets a breeze. UDIM textures can now be baked like any other texture, and UVs can also export to the XML-based SVG vector graphics format. This feature includes the ability to export a selected range of UDIMs either spread out or in separate layers. Moreover, the advanced photorealistic viewport can now display multiple UDIM tiles, further improving parity with Modo’s renderer.
Modo 10 continues to improve the tools you use every day—from modeling, texturing and painting to dynamics and color selection. Highlights include an enhanced vertex map painting toolset with a choice of blend modes, the ability to mask vertex colors by color channel or by polygon selection, and a new option to view each channel in isolation; there’s also a new Volume Preservation option in the Smooth Tool.