“I'm a Modo user since release 201. First I have been impressed by the modeler, then by the renderer when introduced in version 201 together with the texture painting. 301 brought vector displacement which allows the artist to add details not only as height displacement but also as multi-directional displacement. At that point, stability and memory management where definitely important issues. I experienced so many crashes in 302  that I often had to export all my objects  into lightwave to finish and render out my scene. Just to tell you how much I was waiting for the new 401 release!

Owning a 8 cores , 16 Gig Ram machine, I was looking forward to install modo 64 bit version   and see if the memory barrier had been raised. I tested one of my scene with many instances and textures that I could barely render at 1500x1000 pixels in Modo 302.  This limitation is gone and  I could render the same image up to 4000x2700. It seems that 401 is a bit slower than 302:

MODO 302	8 spheres: 21.25s	Logo grass: 15.35s	Final keys: 1.13m	My corn babies scene 39 m
MODO 401	8 spheres: 22.75s	Logo grass: 18s	Final keys: 1.20m	My corn babies scene 44.48 m

Numerous new features have been added in the render department  :

Better motion blur (Anti Aliasing up to 256 sample/pixel), stereoscopic rendering, shadow catcher shader, selective radiosity type (per surface) which allows  hybrid global illumination scenes setup,  volumetric lighting (with deep shadow map option to speed up the rendering of such effects), lights linking (inclusion / exclusion), new anisotropy mapping, blurry refractions and much more.

The interactive preview render received much attention and is now way faster even when moving the camera around. You are able to select not only the surface but a specific layer in the shader tree by right clicking  the surface you want to edit directly in the preview.

Fur and Replicators

Click any pictures to enlarge - Hit 'X' or Close to close the view

Those are the two spectacular new features I was impatient to try out. Just because, well, they're fun!

You can cover any surface (or point cloud) with billions of instances based on poly, poly normal or points location. A weight map or texture layer can be used to control density, size and you can add randomization in the replicator item options. The instances show as boxes in open GL but you can check the interactive preview for almost real time display (depending of the scene and the specs of your machine).

Fur, fibers, hair can be created by either assigning the new fur material to any surface directly in the shader tree (less control but faster setup) or hair guides can be grown on selected polygons. Styling tools are very similar to the sculpting tools (push, move, smooth etc.) and very effective

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The scene on the left use both replicators and fur. Color variation is achieved through a gradient using particle ID input. The render (720x480)  took 19 min. on a 8 cores xeon winxp 64 bit computer.

Replicators Can be used just like fur to create grass or fibers , here with a black and white image to control the size (right picture).