Luxology offers Modo203 to a reduced price for existing owners of Cinema 4D, Maya, 3ds Max, XSI, and LightWave 3D. They can get modo now for the special price of $695 instead of $895, url: http://www.luxology.com/powerof2/
Modo has pros and cons: You get a crossplatform licence for win and osx, so no trouble with the licence keys as you can generate as much as you want on your own and install modo on your computers without any problems, export for static meshes to unity is working well with formats like OBJs (wavefront), cool shadertree and subdivisionsurface modeller, no animation support so far, crashes more often on lowend systems, docs suck…
Has anyone here used Modo much? I have heard some folks rave about it, especially for low poly modeling, but I wonder if it is really inherently better than any other high end modeling app.
I would say it’s a nice tool for pros and artists for doing natural stuff and the physical based rendering results into nice pictures. I havent found anything really outstanding for low poly stuff. but i’m also not a pro. In my opinion the best tool overall is still 3dsmax but hey it’s win only and costs a lot more.
The good thing about modo is the crosslicence. You’re just not fixed to win or osx and free to use it on any computer you work on due to their licence politics. If i buy cheetah i only can work on osx. If you use 3dsmax you have to be on win. If you use cinema4d you have to buy two versions. If you buy Modo you only buy one licence and don’t mind which os you’re running on.
I have used Alias(now autodesk) products since early 1992. I have worked on many many different types of projects, including film and visualization of products and architectural/engineering works. I really like Alias’ stuff. Being a NURBS guy now turned poly/sub-d, I have to say that Modo is worth the cost. I had to unlearn alot of my ways when comming to grasps with Modo.
I almost exclusively use Modo now for modeling. Certainly there are tools that need to be tweaked and enhanced. But overall I haven’t been in ‘LOVE’ with modeling in a long, long time. Once I learned the workflow I have thoroughly enjoyed my time using it.
If you like there is a free 30 day trial available on their website. Overall the community is pretty helpful and the docs for the app are pretty strong, including MANY free tutorials(many of which are videos) that you can find through luxology.com or vertexmonkey.com They also very much support the Mac platform.
Feel free to contact me if you want to know more about my experiences with using Modo.
Sorry, i really have to disagree that the docs in modo are strong as to me they feel weak and incomplete. There is no search, no cross referencing, beside of listing shortcuts and functions the docs are missing a concept which introduces you brick by brick and lead you were you want to go. Same with the video tutorials: they mostly start and end in the middle of nowhere and only explain certain cases but not the whole story. Secondly they don’t cover everything in modo.
All this might be sufficient for people who already are familiar with other tools but for people who are new to this subject it’s just not enough. There are worlds between docs like those in 3dsmax and modo.