Modo 801 Release

[Maximus]

Redshift for Modo seems to be on the way too.

I sure hope so, but there's no confirmation of that yet, to my knowledge. It's just under consideration.


@Nox... You have to remember that Ludvik made that post because he was unable to achieve the super realistic look he was after. I have two comments on this matter:

1) I have seen renders by some other Modo artists (Seth Richardson, Simon Lundberg...) which raise the bar there, and show a different side of what Modo is capable of. The catch here is that getting the renderer under control to actually produce those images takes a deep understand not of rendering alone, but of how Modo does it. Ludvik says he spent 6 months on it... that doesn't really mean anything. I just think there's a learning curve there that is steeper than with other renderers. I'm not convinced it's any real lack of capability.

2) But in any case, he's talking about one very specific use for rendering: photo-realism. And as we all know there are all kinds of looks used in daily 3D productions that are not even close to photo-realistic, but kick ass all the same (and I don't mean NPR stuff here).

So rather than throw a blanket over the concept and label it 'crappy', it may help to consider the broader context. It's not all some people need it to be, but it excels for others.

It definitely needs some streamlining though, and probably a little work on the shader side...

6 months on a render engine? what kind of render engine requires more than 15 days - 1 month top to understand? 6 months is way too much. and if after that amount of time you still are struggling either you have to change career either the render itself is convoluted, hard to use, disorganized, which i tend to think at the second option, knowing Ludvik hes very capable.

[Mathaeus]

Ludvik says he spent 6 months on it... that doesn't really mean anything. I just think there's a learning curve there that is steeper than with other renderers. I'm not convinced it's any real lack of capability.

ho gosh, it's mental ray debates all over again. ;)

yeah... through the years, I've been very careful, to do not say words like 'learning curve' or any exact time, about anything I've supported, But now, it's over

Back to topic, regarding animation, playback still seems to be nowhere, for example, low poly model (turtle-dino-something.lxo), about 5k quads, 20-30 bones plus one blendshape, does not reaches 25 fps, here. Subd level of course zero, everything but mesh and bones, deleted. Comparable thing in Blender runs about 3 times faster.
Should I mention that on same machine, in Softimage, 20k quads, about 200 bones, plus about 300 constraints and expressions, plus deforming ICE tree below envelope, runs at 50 fps. So, great excuse to forget Modo animation, this time.
Nodal shading thing seems to be fine, even it stops at material level (if I'm correct).
Anyway, it's plenty for 400 bucks upgrade.

[El Burritoh]

Yeah the performance with deformers is not great at all, and it's a HUGE target on the devs' hit list. Supposedly it has nothing to do with the deformers themselves, but a GL display issue.

And I stand by my learning curve comment.

[Mathaeus]

Yeah the performance with deformers is not great at all, and it's a HUGE target on the devs' hit list. Supposedly it has nothing to do with the deformers themselves, but a GL display issue.

agree, just got 25fps, by deleting the small things. So yes, most likely, redraw issue.

[MikeM]

Well after looking around for a while, I am moving to Modo, I'll keep using XSI for quite a bit still, hopefully until I reach a level where I can be as productive in Modo.

I mostly do realtime/videogame assets so Modo seems to be well suited for that, not wanting to use any AD product I don't see better options anyways (for realtime/videogames).
I'll definitely miss the stack operator and non destructive workflow from XSI, after asking, the modo devs don't seem to be interested in having something like a stack operator (I think) because they fear it might be a hit on performance or stability to have one or doesn't go with their philosophy of how the software works.
Mesh fusion might make up for that though as far as procedural modelling goes.

[angus_davidson]

Yeah the performance with deformers is not great at all, and it's a HUGE target on the devs' hit list. Supposedly it has nothing to do with the deformers themselves, but a GL display issue.

agree, just got 25fps, by deleting the small things. So yes, most likely, redraw issue.

What hardware setups are you guys using. I am getting good results in the mac version with a GT 650M

[Helli]

Well after looking around for a while, I am moving to Modo, I'll keep using XSI for quite a bit still, hopefully until I reach a level where I can be as productive in Modo.

I mostly do realtime/videogame assets so Modo seems to be well suited for that, not wanting to use any AD product I don't see better options anyways (for realtime/videogames).
I'll definitely miss the stack operator and non destructive workflow from XSI, after asking, the modo devs don't seem to be interested in having something like a stack operator (I think) because they fear it might be a hit on performance or stability to have one or doesn't go with their philosophy of how the software works.
Mesh fusion might make up for that though as far as procedural modelling goes.

What the devs also mentioned. They don't want to add a history stack in general but they want to add more modifiers who are "live" like mesh fusion. They totally got the argument that you, as example want to have a bevel to be an operator which can be changed later on as example. So they will work on that.

[Mathaeus]

Yeah the performance with deformers is not great at all, and it's a HUGE target on the devs' hit list. Supposedly it has nothing to do with the deformers themselves, but a GL display issue.

agree, just got 25fps, by deleting the small things. So yes, most likely, redraw issue.

What hardware setups are you guys using. I am getting good results in the mac version with a GT 650M

Just my home quad core i5 plus GeForce Gt 430. But, as I already gave a small comparison to Blender and Softimage, hardware is pretty much irrelevant. By the way, in mentioned scene, they set the playback to force the real time by skipping the frames. A little bit of cheating, hehe
Honestly I didn't expected anything competitive to Maya or SI when it comes to playback - as these two, if I'm correct, are only two having a lazy evaluation. Finally, I just can't afford to learn rigging and animation, both in Maya and Modo - so Modo is turned off, in this area.
But it's not only that - still no quaternion rotation interpolation, what's called 'dynamic parenting' is still just a hard switch. How they will make a decent motion graphics with this, one day .Too much of focusing to, imho, personal vision of someone, how animation should look like, and what animation is. Yet another area for fixing the 'great' ideas in years to come. Like old story with that unhappy shader tree, and idiotic comparisons with Photoshop workflow.
To be fair, renderer got a lot of improvements, compared to 601, hair shader seems to be much faster to render...

[reberhart]

Another Dorito setup in Modo. This one doesn't require a Wrap deformer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFumtHd ... e=youtu.be

[Mathaeus]

6 months on a render engine? what kind of render engine requires more than 15 days - 1 month top to understand? 6 months is way too much. and if after that amount of time you still are struggling either you have to change career either the render itself is convoluted, hard to use, disorganized, which i tend to think at the second option, knowing Ludvik hes very capable.

Well I found this renderer just easy to figure out - for my taste, it's simplified, for example, no separate shadow shader. Some things are still missing, like IOR for fresnel reflection. But that experience is related to TV commercials - let's say, moving bottle of beer, covered with water drops - so Modo was capable to pull out the caustics from (bigger) water drops, do a fine displacement on glass and labels, lighted by area lights, all that in some reasonable render time. Didn't took more than one evening to setup everything. Also, some other glass-water stuff.
Generally, as long as this shader tree thing is there (it still is), more than ten or twenty materials, is just dangerous. As everything is structured as one folder, it's too much easy to do mistake - and Modo wasn't able to undo, sometimes (it seems this 'no undo' is still present). They added some improvements, but, still it's unbelievable difficult to figure out what is connected to what. Render pass system over this shader tree thing, this is bad joke. So, optimal configuration could be MoMa ( connection from Maya to Modo renderer), allowing to use Maya for everything but renderer, and just forget the rest of Modo. Ironically, main problem of Modo render is - shader tree.
For archiviz, I don't know, but, if V-Ray is a tool of trade for archiviz - then, go with vRay, what else to say.

[Helli]

Another Dorito setup in Modo. This one doesn't require a Wrap deformer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFumtHd ... e=youtu.be

okey, awwwwesome

[MauricioPC]

This new approach is a improvement from Sergio Mucino one. Very nice.

[Mathaeus]

and... (I hope this is my last, boring, post here), just checked out Modo hair shader, it seems it renders a lot faster than one in 601. That is, for people who need the out-of-the-box, believable blonde or mid tone hair shading, Modo is one of just few public available options. Hair shader is 'true' dual scattering Marschner shading model, very well tuned in advance. In 'studio with renderfarm' category, that is, Arnold, Renderman, 3delight, for such thing, you need to hire a coder, which is, perhaps, next $$$$$. Best hair shading thing is probably implementation by Arno Zinke in Lagoa ( renderer), but Modo shader is very close to that, imho.

[gfxman]

I had great expectation in modo. In the end, after 10 years of development, it's just a lightwave on steroids. Xsi with ice, the stack, it's simply in another league...

[MauricioPC]

A longer demo from the character animation of the presentation by Brad.



I don't know much about animation (how to do it in a 3D program), but I think it's very intuitive.

[pcd]

Ok, just my two cents. Modo does not have NLA or animation layers. How to talk about character animation without animation layers or non-linear-animation? I mean Blender has this already and a 1500$(or 1600$) does not, but is advertised as a character animation tool? Regarding the renderer, well it's very good. Not sure why the guy was not able to take the best out of it(we all have our blank spots) but here is a little render i done with Modo for a CAD bottle cap i created. Image is compressed to fit the size, but you can see the quality is there(poor quality for the left cap is do to compression). The full size image is very good, picture perfect. Not sure about the interior/building stuff i only do character animation, general animation and product shots. For me the lack of animation layers and/or NLA it's a no go. Other then this i think for me XSI for as long as i can and when ready to move Houdini or Modo if improve on animation size till then..