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Hey Tim,

Now that 901 is out, I've read some complains on the TF forum about stability and bugs. How your experience with it has been? Cheers.

Like any recently released software, it's going to have some instability. However, I'm told that according to internal metrics at TF, 901 is more stable than 801 was when it was was released. TF release 4-5 service packs within a single version's life cycle, and they're pretty great at fixing crashes, as long as they can be reproduced.

My own experience... it's been really stable for me. I'm sure there are specific problem areas, but for what I do, it's been stable. Surprisingly so, actually. If folks are really worried about it, they can always hold off until SP1 or 2.

Honestly, who here adopted gung-ho the first build of any of Soft's releases? I know we never did. We'd always wait until SP1/2 came out. That's the software business.

FYI, I've posted updates for 2 of the plugins mentioned a few posts up. On the chance you were using these and were having stability issues, these updates should help. Be sure to delete the old plugins before installing these.

Modo Project Manager 1.0.7
Popups 1.0.3

@ElBurritoh: Thanks for the kits. Good as a learning material for scripting in 901. Cheers!

My pc is old: i7 920 with a gtx 460, my experience so far: 3 crashes per hour aprox. BUT.. (a big but) nothing can compare against meshfusion, except if polycount is a must for you.

First: a little explanation about meshfusion> It does clean boolean operations with a resulting quad only-mesh. And -to put the cherry on top- the whole thing is non-destructive.. you have to try it to believe. Im not sure why meshfusion is not that popular as it should be.

I can only have words to praise meshfusion, because it cuts modeling time.. .you can model things like the drone from oblivion in no time, and with clean quads (and luckily, modo somehow reduces the final count of quads). Depends of your needs: 4x times more polys than traditional modeling, but 10x times less spending creating the model. I saw a topic about modeling in XSI, and let me tell you this guys: you cant model as fast in XSI as you do with mesh fusion.

Sadly, meshfusion is the only part of modo that works for me. Anyway, im back to modo (until the damn thing crashes again), but first, the question that needs to be asked:

is it possible to have meshfusion with ICE?

luchifer wrote: is it possible to have meshfusion with ICE?

I think it is. Unfortunately can't give exact answer, my ancient SI version don't know for ICE topology operators. Anyway here's little exercise in Houdini, done with a few standard SOPs for cuts, plus some vector math trickery for blends - nothing of that is 'rocket math'. Of course this is just an exercise, to get something streamlined for wide usage, a lot of (unpleasant) adjusting work is required.

Now, why is not widely accepted (and why I will not update to 901, even MF it's built in, now).

- if I'm correct, it still rely on custom normals to render smoothly. With quads or without, I don't believe it's possible to get it subdivided. So, if you want to get it out of Modo, nothing really different than standard set of issues of Nurbs meshing (while I already feel confident with Nurbs modeling, already have MoI).
- not supported by huge communities, like Max or C4d. We, SI users, already know how it's going. They'll just ignore, what isn't accessible for them. Just like edge weighting on subds in XSI 4 or so. Great, but how to get this in Max. From these days until today, what works everywhere, is a plain subd, without even hard edges. Especially today, a lot of new people have some skills with rendering and scene assembly, V-Ray and so on - but almost zero modeling skills - so, plain subd is bullet proof that works.
- this one is really serious - it seems it don't like a really small details - while classic Nurbs or subd modeling has zero problems, here. A lot of interesting of interesting shapes to see, but ( if I'm correct) - no one, finished and detailed, model of car or plane from real world. While there are tons of very exact subd models all around, despite the all pain when it comes to detailing.

P.S. to be fair, all what I said here, belongs to 'I'm creating models for use in another app by another user' configuration - for Modo user, doing everything in Modo, MF should be great tool, nevertheless.

Custom normals ? Of course it's evident ! Plus the normal tools in modo are really bad.

Thank you mathaeus so I even don't have to try it out... Dead end, do the normals exports in an alembic or fbx at least ?

NNois wrote:Custom normals ? Of course it's evident !

From what I've read somewhere, I think on MoI forums, it seems they were experimenting with subd - available results in beta, but they didn't released it. Maybe they have plans for 'real' subd output, one day, who knows. In any case, a lot of experience is on their side.
If I were you, I'd try, why not.

drooling over pySide..with Modo LightBank.
Man, amazing job!! is there a tuto, or at least a workflow video of them?
Cheers.

Not yet, apart from some quick examples here. But that doesn't really tell you how to create a full plugin or kit. I have been thinking of doing a write-up on the matter. In the meantime, I have posted 3 kits that are all PySide-based, so perhaps those can provide a starting point. It's pretty straightforward if you have PySide/PyQt experience already.