Modo 501 is now out… Anyone try it yet? Does fbx to unity still work? I don’t see a lot of love for game developers in this release other than smoothing groups. Anyone else catch any other new features that would be useful specifically for game modeling?
No. I discovered it yesterday, as I check their site every couple weeks to check to see if there have been any useful developments*. As has been the case for a few years now, there weren’t. Can’t %#$@ing believe it doesn’t have bones yet. 
- I think it’s time to quit. Lighwave 10 has two weeks left before it misses its advertised release date; hopefully it’s mush less disappointing.
I remember a lot of people who couldn’t believe that 401 didn’t have bones. Well at least 501 gives you a monster teeth mesh preset!
Pixar SubD, tons of new procedural textures, fancy fur and hair, faster rendering. I don’t know, lots of great stuff in there for cgi folks not game devs, but yeah wtb skinned mesh animation as amazing as the rest of modo.
Great update if you’re not primary after animation. I think they did the right thing and enhanced the aspects their tool is primary used for in the first place and there they showed some love to detail instead of doing some half baked things. Some real quality improvements and even the docs look like science fiction, looking at them from an Unity angle.
Nice tour which explains 501 quite good, even little enhancements, although the audio quality differs:
Most of the features are either for visualization or in case of game models for environment art (after all object driven animations DO exist in modo). The rendering aspects are cool, even for game assets, I think, since many of them can be related to baking textures, maps and painting etc. The new modeling improvements look nice, as well.
That there’s no Bone/skin animation system … well. Sucks a little. Still I think modo will take it’s place like Zbrush did - as either a very cool standalone App for those who need only the features that are in there or as a very good extension to any other app in the production pipeline.
Also for the record: I think at SOME point bones and skinning will come.
Setting up animations via schematics already is kind of cool.
Yeah - I’ve watched the video after I posted my comment here. If I had the spare money I’d probably buy a Modo license, right now. The program looks pretty cool and like a very good addition to my existing programs already.
I kinda fear that buying modo might make ma regret having bought Topogun, though. The retopo tools in modo look pretty cool as well…
Yeah, a little disappointed 501 didnt come out with bones/character animation as well. I’m not bothering to get the upgrade either, since there is nothing in 501 that I really need/want.
I agree, hopefully Lightwave 10 is better (and I also hope their fbx export gets fixed in 10, since 9.6 sometimes messes up normals and animations during export).
FWIW, I missed the multires + PIXAR SubD feature the other day. I haven’t checked the implementation, but that sounds very promising. I like modo a lot better than any alternatives, for sculpting, because its interface is better and it’s great to be able to use regular modeling tools along with sculpting tools. However, the lack of multires made it rather useless to me before.
I had my problems getting into the way the Modo IDE works but after i passed that there is a lot to appreciate, actually it makes certain actions in Unity feeling awkward.
I have to say after watching those videos, the occlusion maps and the ability to use them as a mask for painting looked really amazing.
I also noticed workflow improvements in the shader tree. Right-click and save directly to file? Awesome time saver right there! Creating new render outputs or temporary image maps was a bit cumbersome when it came to baking.
Modo is the only 3d package that I feel comfortable with as a programmer. I find myself instinctively trying to use some of it’s conventions when using the Unity IDE.
I was looking at some Blender 2.5 rigging tutorials the other day. Still the same unwieldy beast. “Now click on your bone, hold alt-control-shit-p…” I was really hoping for a modo implementation.
I wish that you at least could steer the sceneview in a modoish like way.
At least Blender lets you use the Command key*.
modo and Unity are both in the same lame backwards boat. With Lightwave 10’s release, they will be in an even smaller group of clunky non-NDOF hell. At least Unity isn’t scared to take advantage of non-cross-platform navigation tools; the three-finger swipes in the Scene View are very handy.
- But 2.5x doesn’t have NDOF support yet, so actually, it doesn’t, for me, because that means I have to continue with 2.49.
Whilst those swipe commands are comfortable, the surface at least of the MacPro’s trackpad isn’t. My fingers always hurt after some time. SONY’s surface works better but also there after some time it hurts and both aren’t a replacement for the mouse or whatever non touching device you might use. Modo does a good job with the muse input.
What hurts, exactly? I’ve never heard of this, but I just asked my girlfriend about it. She says her wrists hurt after a while, but not her fingers. I have never had a problem like this, but this might be a combination of my frequent usage of Captains of Crush grippers, heavy-duty rubber bands, and string bending on a long-scale guitar.
I agree completely – modo especially does a great job with stylus+tablet input, which does replace a mouse for me. But a stylus (without pressure, tilt, bearing, and rotation) or mouse is still only two axes at a time. An NDOF device and multitouch trackpad are only good as supplements, not replacements, but the former is still incredibly important for 3D.
My fingertips, the friction hurts after some time, no matter if it’s the MacBookPro, the iPhone or the iPad. Maybe mine are very sensitive but i only can drag over those surfaces for a certain amount of time, even if did a lot of climbing. I always wanted to try a stylus but it never worked out so far, so i’m fine with my mice, in rare cases i shout at my computer but it’s rather unflexible as input so far. Thank you Xerox!
What’s really cool are the speedbumps, 35% on a regular basis.
I wonder how much Unity could benefit from similar optimisations, i think there is room for improvements.
taumel, we’re working and delivering big optimisations (batching could be one of the examples). Sure, we’re put more focus on runtime-performance (and actually that’s where it matters), but editor part benefits from it too.
Cool!
I really was surprised by the speed benefits i got in Modo 501. It’s not the usual stuff that certain actions you barely use are 3 times faster whilst the rest isn’t. It’s more a overall noticeable boost in rendering time, as i wrote i get steady speedbumbs of approximately 35% and a lot less memory usage. They said that they had rewritten several parts of the render engine, as mostly, as well as worked closely together with Intel to get proper SIMD support in there.
It definately payed out this time.