Modo 401 Review by Marc Hermitte - Part 2

Modeling

Various improvements such as background constraint, pen tool (together with the background constraint for re-topology of complex meshes) and more efficient quad mod (makes contiguous quads at a click of the mouse, snapping and welding to the closest vertex) , 1D and 2D profiles usable with the following tools: bevel, bridge, sketch and curve extrude, tube tool, radial sweep, curves and even clone effectors.

Uv editing has been sped up with a few enhancements : Ability to save the constraint points used with the relax tool to a vertex selection and recall them later (without having to re-select everything manually), Uv pack packs up the Uvs with a greater density, transform tools in tear off mode are now faster.

In the painting area, you can now paint directly on linear or cubic textures (not just on UV), image sequences can be used, painting works on backdrop items,  painting is fully multi-threaded, UV seam issue has been reduced with a new UV seam projection method, autoscale option (with imageInk) scales the picture relative to the object,  keeping the texture at a constant scale no matter how much you zoom in or out . The speed of the sculpting has been increased with the addition of a “fast mode” that interpolates the image sculpting (at the expense of precision).

I tested out the modeling and sculpting  for about 20-30min, starting with a basic tube object to finish with this “space worm”... or whatever you want to call It.. The tools seem way faster, especially  the vector painting (at 4096x4096). Instance painting was much more fluid than in previous version... I'm not sure if It's due to the changes in 401 or the advantage of using a 64 bit version of Modo.

From poly tube (above) to sub-D mesh sculpting , vector painting and instancing (below).

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Animation

That's where Modo 401 shows the greatest number of innovations. Inverse Kinematic , channel linking, user channels, constraints (position, rotation, scale, direction, vertex position, vertex normal, edge position and normal, polygon position and normal, parent constraint, distance, path, etc.) channel modifiers (aka expressions) with preset fonctions (math, revolve, oscillator, noise, gravity etc.) Some pretty advanced rigging can be setup, like the tank scene (by Rich Hurrey and Michael Blackbourn ) that required about 10'000 channel links and 5'000 constraints!

The IK is very stable and easy to setup. After parenting the parts you want to animate, just run “Apply IK” , done! You can add constraints like direction (target or point at in other applications) or use the basic math channel modifier to mimic expressions in other 3D software. There are 32 channel modifiers in total, enough to keep  you busy for a while!

Channel haul works like sliders and let you animate something within a given range. Keyframe original state, end state, link to the slider within a min/max range, done. Also you can create a link between two channels, a  relationship that can be keyed and animated over time.I barely scratched the surface of the new animation system... if you'd like to see more you can find good videos at: www.luxology.com