As far as the renderer, well - I'd just take a look at the gallery. Modo's renderer is one of the best and fastest raytracers out there that supports just about everything (MIS, EIS, sss, displacement, vector displacement, blobs, volumetrics, hair, fur, particles, multiple GI methods that can be mixed, mixing different shading rates on a per polygon basis....it's very powerful). The Preview renderer can also function like Octane and Maxwell - just set it to extended refinement and let it go until you like what you see (no messing around with setting specific GI or SSS samples...stuff like that). If you don't like the renderer you can use a really great (IMO) Octane implementation, or Maxwell (I have them both and they're both very usable, although I almost always render in Modo). The Previewer is by far the most comprehensive and feature complete in the business (in terms of interactivity, sampling surfaces for editing, viewing any channel or render output, isolating what you're working on, opening multiple previews to see many cameras or outputs at once, using transform tools in the Preview, so much more - it's probably the best part of the program). You have node based shading now so you can sample aspects of the scene and use the data to drive shading. The render passes are extremely powerful (you can change pretty much *anything* on a per pass basis, not just lights and materials but entire animations - any channel in the scene). It's been hard for people to grasp though and needs some better UI support for people to really 'get it'.
I think Modo is a potential long-term replacement for SI - it's not Houdini (which is a good thing for most Modo users, Modo is better at the types of things Modo people typically do than Houdini would be). However, if The Foundry wants former SI users then Modo needs to get better at FX/ICE type work. They've made enourmous progress the last few releases (nodal rigging, nodal particle system/integrated physics system, nodal shading). All of these systems are 'unified' talk to each other and use the same schematic, so it's pretty evident what their goals are. If you're in this game for the long term eventually SI users will have to move on (maybe this year, maybe in 5 years) - Modo (IMO) is a viable option.
-Greg
pcd wrote: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..
