modo 601 delivers character animation, dynamics, retopology modeling and rendering advances, plus a wide variety of workflow enhancements. We hope to show you how modo is the uniquely creative tool for artists and designers.

modo® 601

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Warner McGee

modo’s powerful animation capabilities include new character animation and rig-ging tools including an easy-to-use Pose Tool and a flexible system of layerable deformers. A system of Actors with assignable Poses and Actions speeds the animation process.

Character Animation and Deformers

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“Character animation done right... We’ve all been holding our breath for this one and it was worth the wait. Bones are laid out intuitively and with ease. The Heat Bind option creates one of the cleanest one click binds I have seen. Vertex map painting allows you to refine and tune your weights with incredible efficiency and feedback. I could go on and on...”

Greg BrownSenior CGI Artist

Alter

Peter Eriksson

A Skeleton Creation Tool in modo 601 lets you quickly set up a hierarchy of bones that are connected by joints. You can bind your mesh geometry to the bones to smoothly generate weight maps that control how flexing will occur. Weight maps are now visible in the modo viewports as different colors overlaid on the current shading for the mesh.

Skeleton Tool/Mesh Binding

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Animation by Matt Cox. Head model by Gelmi.

A full body Inverse Kinematics solver in modo 601 lets you easily manipulate a skeletal chain according to assigned goals including pinning. Pull on the arm of character and its whole body will react.... move the tip of a tail and the tail plus the whole body responds. You can blend inverse kinematics with forward kine-matics to create believable movements quickly.

Full-body Inverse Kinematics

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Greg Leuenberger

modo 601 lets you create poses for characters without complex rigging. Start with any mesh that has an attached skeleton and easily manipulate it into the shape you want. Use the Pose Tool to animate your characters, as a prototyping tool for designing character rigs, or simply to pose models for sculpting and mod-eling operations.

Pose Tool

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“With the Pose Tool, you can use FK really quickly to get the main rotations done, and then just right-click to freeze any joints you want to constrain, and pose all the subtle gestures you want and everything is configurable on the fly. It gives a lot more control and subtlety than using pure FK (as well as being quicker), and you are not locked into any kind of rig since joints can be frozen and unfrozen at will.”

Richard Yot Itchy Animation, UK

Warner McGee

You can directly sculpt a mesh even at the stage of setting up a character in modo, providing an exceptionally flexible environ-ment for animating characters.

Pose Space Sculpting

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“ I gotta say the new Pose tool is really cool. Just throwing a model from the asset directory, draw a skeleton... do a bind and then using the Pose tool you can have a pose in a couple of minutes.”

Greg Leuenberger President

SaberTooth Productions, Inc.

Warner McGee

In modo 601, you can see Visible Motion Paths for keyframed or dynamic objects which are studded with either keyframes or frames, with control over how much motion is shown before and after the current time. Motion Paths are a great tools for seeing the full scope of an item’s animation at any point in the timeline.

You can create Actors in modo 601 which can be positioned along a timeline with named Poses and animated with a series of Actions. Actors are normally characters but can be any kind of hierarchy that you wish to animate.

Actors with Poses and Actions Visible Motion Paths

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Warner McGee

An extensive system of Deformers in modo 601 provides a variety of ways to modify the shape of animated items down to the vertex level. Multiple Deformers can be readily combined and the results are normalized for a uniform and balanced result. modo’s uniquely powerful implemen-tation allows you to layer deformation effects, one on top of another. This opens up a range of possible deformation behaviors that typical skeleton-based systems can’t easily achieve.

Deformers

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“So I’m rigging away on my character and somehow I smoothed out the geometry at some point and didn’t realize it (you know ctrl-d smooth when in component mode). Well after a few days of work I noticed this mis-take that I made... and my first thought is that I’m totally ****ed. I would need to throw away all the work I did over the past few days. In Maya I would have... but not in modo it turns out. modo stores all the weighting info at the point level, so I literally went back to an older ver-sion, copied the polygons out... went to my new scene removed the messed up polys and pasted in the correct ones. Worked like a charm... flawless really.”

Anonymous (by request) beta tester

Alex Friderici

Leveraging the integrated architecture of modo, you can now use Textures, in conjunction with Falloffs, to modulate non-material related elements in your modo scene for unique effects.

Textured FalloffsAs of modo 601, Falloffs are not just for affecting the spatial extent of modeling operations, they can be used to attenuate the influence of Deformers while animating. This interaction of Deformers and Falloffs provides tremendous control within animation rigs.

Falloffs as Deformers

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“The idea of using falloffs to drive morph defor-mations is great. I could see this being really useful for creating a kind of localized wind ef-fect. Say when a helicopter hovers over trees or something.”

Wes Ball

Luxology

You can now load and save animated scenes in the industry-standard Alembic format for multi-application pipelines.

modo 601 now allows MDD driven objects to interact with dynamic objects.

MDD Driven Object Deformation Alembic™ Support

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“The people are animated via MDD with some variation for the anima-tion added to get a semi-random effect. The scene also uses repli-cated umbrellas, motion blur and gradient-based on particle ID.”

Yazan Malkosh

Yazan Malkosh

Rigid and soft body dynamics, based on the Bullet Physics Library™ engine, are now a standard part of modo.

Dynamics

“Fallen petals are instances, driven by recoil and the still petals are replicators.”

Boris Cargo

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Boris Cargo

Rigid Bodies can now respond to collisions and be affected by a variety of forces, such as gravity and motors, using recoil Dynamics in modo.

Rigid Body Dynamics

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Ryan Drue

Soft Body effects, like flapping capes and draping tableclothes, can now be generated automatically us-ing recoil Dynamics in modo.

Soft Body Dynamics

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Yazan Malkosh

The world’s most powerful polygon and Subdivision Surface modeler is now even more powerful and ef-ficient to use. Here we explore some of modo 601’s modeling improvements.

Modeling

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Warner McGee

“The retopology workflow in 601 is really good. I’m a TopoGun user, but the new topology tools in modo 601 are better than what Topogun of-fers, especially the way you can just duplicate a whole edge loop really quickly, great for quickly topologising limbs and so on. “

Richard YotItchy Animation, UK

modo 601 has a focused environment for re-topology modeling which combines a specialized user interface with new tools that make it easier than ever to cre-ate clean geometry on top of a background mesh.

Dedicated Re-Topology Modeling Tools and Viewport

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Barry Croucher

The new Topology Pen is the Swiss Army Knife® of topology modeling. Within a single tool you can drag, weld, extend and create new geometry. Using tool-specific hot keys, you can easily drag components or edge loops, duplicate components and loops, slide edges and remove com-ponents on the fly. Additionally, the tool can automatically create UV data as it creates new geometry. This single tool is an incredible accelerator to the topology modeling process.

Topology Pen Tool

“modo 601 is worth the entry price for the new Topology Pen alone.”

Robin Konieczny

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Warner McGee

Pixar Subdivision Surface modeling in modo 601 lets you weight individual vertices and efficiently work with your models at the desired level of detail while rendering at maximum surface quality.

Pixar® Subdivision Surfaces Improvements

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Geoff Lester

Now as you work in modo, the UV map for your model adjusts in real-time to match your modified geometry – letting you concentrate on model creation rather than adjusting UV maps.

Preserve UV’s

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Hughes Poncet

With one click, the new Mesh Cleanup tool lets you optionally remove floating vertices, remove one or two point polygons, fix duplicate points, eliminate co-linear vertices, fix face normals, merge discontinuous UV’s and unify polygons. This is a great tool for getting imported models in good shape for texturing, rendering or other downstream operations.

Mesh Cleanup

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Robin Konieczny

This new modeling option constrains vertices to their closest position on a background mesh during model-ing operations to further facilitate re-topology model-ing. This option is present on tools such as Add Loop, Loop Slice and Edge Slide.

New Geometry Constraint “Point” Mode

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Andy Probst

modo 601 has a new Soft Selection Falloff that grabs both the selected area and a variable zone outside the selection. The Falloff implicitly selects elements around selection and sets influence weights based on the distance from the closest ele-ment inside the radius. The Soft Selection Falloff also has a “Use Connectivity” option which considers surface connectivity, so that unwanted areas remain unselected.

Soft Selection Falloff

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“Lazy selection in modo 601 makes tweaking a lot easier. I can be far away from a vertex, and use soft selection on top of that. If I am inside a polygon but I am tweaking vertices then i can be far from the verts and tweak them without having to select them. I just use the translate/tweak function right away. If I have a model that needs heavy tweaking, this can half the number of commands I need to execute, and save time as a result.”

Martin Krol

Yazan Malkosh

Lazy Selection is introduced for vertices, edges and polygons – so that you need not be positioned over a geometric element to select it. The closest element from the mouse cursor position is selected despite the selection hit size. Lazy Selection works great in silhouette mode; you can be outside of the mesh and still select elements easily on the profile. It also works very well in conjunction with the new Topology Pen tool for extending the outer edges of a mesh without having to precisely pick the edges first.

Lazy Selection

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Yazan Malkosh

modo has always been progressive with how it deals with weight maps... allowing you to set up weights and add or remove points/polygons all the while keeping all your weighting intact. Now you can use modo’s paint system to paint, scale, erase and smooth vertex (weight) maps on your mesh. This works just like the other brush tools in modo so there is virtually no learning curve if you already know how to use modo’s existing painting and sculpting tools. Weighting can now be added to weight “containers” that allow for weighting to be stored at the item level. This gives users a more streamlined approach for weighting multiple meshes as well as making it much easier to build a rig and re-use it in other scenes.

Vertex Map Painting

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Yazan Malkosh

The experience of using modo is more natural than ever. Here are some of the many new workflow enhancements that further accelerate the creation process in modo 601.

Workflow

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Krzysztof Malec

Matcap Materials provide a shaded surface that remains uniform as you look at your model from any angle. As you work with your model in dif-ferent perspective views, the consistent visibility of Matcap Materials in modo 601 help you perform sculpting and other modeling operations more efficiently. Access the supplied Matcap Materials or render your own!

Matcap Materials

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You can now display items as silhouettes in order to readily adjust the outer profile of an object as well as to visually isolate items in profile when modeling, posing or animating in modo 601.

Silhouette View

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Yazan Malkosh

The Render View in modo 601 has evolved into a multi-function environ-ment for rendering, baking, image viewing, image processing and perform-ing side-by-side image comparisons. The enhanced Render View in modo 601 provides a focused environment for achieving final rendering results.

Enhanced Render View

This image had color adjustments done in the Enhanced Render View. From the reflections you can see that Area lights are also now visible to cameras.

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model by Chris Hague, image by Philip Lawson

The Paint Stroke Engine in modo 601 is both faster and of better quality. This provides a more fluid expe-rience when painting and yields smoother results.

3D Paint Performance

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100% painted in modo 601 by Richard Yot

Preview Renderer now lets you specify a total Render Time, giving you a predictable way to meet deadlines as you render out to an image sequence or a movie file.

Render within a Capped Time Limit

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Robin Koniecnzy

You can now use a 3Dconnexion® 3D mouse with modo 601. This provides yet another quick and intui-tive way to adjust your view in modo.

3D Mouse Support

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3Dconnexion

modo 601 provides numerous rendering improve-ments that enhance the rendering experience and make it easier than ever to produce exactly the results you want.

Rendering

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Seth Richardson

You can now use meshes or other 3D shapes to visu-ally subtract out parts of your scene at render time, revealing interior portions of your models without hav-ing to manually remove or hide intervening geometry.

Render Booleans

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Barry Croucher

Sky Portals offer an intuitive way to render interior spaces by letting light pass through windows or skylights from the surrounding environment. Sky Portals funnel the out-side light into your scene for natural results.

Sky Portals

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Wiek Luijkin

You can now render the hard edges on your model with a softer, rounded appearance that emphasizes edge highlights – for more realistic looking mechani-cal designs or architectural elements.

Rounded Edge Shader

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Pascal Beeckmans

You can now render textures (including groups) on your models with random size and rotation across the object with no UV map required. “Texture Bombing” is a creative new way to avoid the “tiled” look, and to efficiently achieve organic-looking textures, like mold, dirt or battle damage.

Texture Bombing (Texture Replicator)

“All textures are done with the texture bombing method. There’s 4 layers of textures (some done with groups of different textures); 1) a base layer of concrete textures replicated all over, 2) bullet holes on the left side (writ-ing out “ouch”), 3) cracks in the concrete and 4)some generic crusting on top. I used three different replica-tor sources to get what I was after.”

Wiek Luikjen

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Wiek Luijken

You can achieve a truly flat look with no specular-ity when rendering rough materials like clay, fuzzy fabric, brick and terra cotta.

Oren-Nayer Diffuse Roughness Shading

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Yazan Malkosh

You now have control over how deeply Subsurface Scattering is rendered in modo, for better results when rendering translucent areas, like ears and noses, or materials like wax and cheese.

Subsurface Scattering Depth Control

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Yazan Malkosh

Camera Clipping lets you truncate the view through a camera up to a specified clipping distance. This new tool provides an interior cross-section that can be animated to gradually reveal or hide internal struc-ture and detail.

Camera Clipping (By Surface or Material)

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Wiek Luijken

Render Passes let you easily and automatically render scenes with alternate settings such as: different materials for color studies, different item visibility for post-render compositing, or different pixel resolutions for film/video, web and print applications. You have complete control over what attributes of your scene are rendered.

Render Passes

"Render Passes; Thank God, no more saving 15 versions of the same scene only to have to do it again if I modify it."

Hagop KaneboughazianAnimation Director

Viscira

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Felipe Sarandini

The Preview Renderer can now be set to render at full resolution so that you can employ it for final image or movie production. Previews can now show motion blur and volumetrics too.

Preview Renderer Improvements

“This image is straight from modo. No post work at all – it is from the Preview Renderer directly with extended refinement. Shows off the new Undersea effect in modo too.”

Yazan Malkosh

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Yazan Malkosh

Spectral Samples provide more control for calculat-ing dispersion values for prismatic/rainbow effects in rendering glass-like objects. This gives a high-quality, realistic appearance for crystals, gems and other fac-eted or glass-like objects.

Spectral Samples

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Yazan Malkosh

EDITORS NOTE: there is no such file StuManFu_601simple_HalfToneShader

Several new shaders are provided in modo 601 to simplify realistic rendering of hair and skin and to provide additional non-photorealistic rendering options.

Shading

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Stuart Hall

Skin ShaderHuman skin is a rather complex organ, comprised of multiple layers of materials, each absorbing, scattering and reflecting light differently, to create a very subtle but distinct look that we as humans are intimately familiar with. The new Skin Shader included in modo 601 provides many familiar control to simulate the subtle nuance that is human skin.

“modo 601’s new skin shader allows you to create complex layered subsurface effects in an intuitive manner. New subsurface effects like “Maximum Depth” give you precise control over how light scatters through a surface.”

Greg BrownSenior CGI Artist

Alter

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model by Lee Perry-Smith (www.ir-ltd.net), image by Tim Crowson

A new Hair Shader with a rich, but accessible, range of controls is provided. Based on An Artist-Friendly Hair Shading System, the Hair Shader simulates light scattering and reflections through many hair fibers within a volume of hair.

Hair Shader

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Jason Bickerstaff

A Cel Shader is included for toon or comic-book style rendered results. This Shader provides a wide range of controls over diffuse, specular and reflection bands, plus the ability to draw edges.

Cel Shader

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Barry Croucher

You can now replicate vast numbers of objects across sur-faces with greater ease and variability, and paint and import particle clouds to drive the location of objects. Volumetric rendering has been added to modo 601, letting you create blobby objects and cottony materials like clouds and smoke.

Volumes, Replicators and Particle Clouds

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Pascal Beeckmans

modo 601 supports Volumetric Rendering so you can create clouds, smoke, cotton and similar volume-filling effects and get dense or wispy results with self-shadowing. They can also be procedurally textured in order to achieve, for instance, a fibrous look. Results are viewable in the Preview Renderer.

Volumetric Rendering

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Pascal Beeckmans

Volumetric rendering in modo 601 can be used to cre-ate a wide range of effects, including production of realistic or cartoony clouds.

Volumetric Rendering (Clouds)

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“Here’s another quick cartoon cloud render, this time using the ‘surface as volume’ feature. The clouds are a roughly cloud shaped surface, duplicated into an array with a dis-placement on the whole. Render time 20 seconds.

Gregory Duquesne

Gregory Duquesne

Time-varying replicas let you have a set of duplicated objects which exhibit slightly different animation compared to each other. You have control over Time Offset, and you can also introduce Random Time Variation.

Replicator Improvements

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Hagop Kaneboughazian

modo 601 lets you load RealFlow particles into modo and render them with replicators, volumetrics, and sprites. The RealFlow BIN format is a simple, com-plete format that provides an excellent way to get particle data into modo.

RealFlow™ Support

This particle sim was exported by Matt Cox using the Next Limit RealFlow Plug-in for Softimage. Inside modo, particle age was used to drive particle size and particle dissolve using a gradient curve.

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Matt Cox

You can create gooey, waxy and viscous shapes using the new Blob items in modo. These implicit surfaces can be textured, and you have control over sizing, as well as globbiness/surface cohesion, to create a variety of interesting shapes. You can control where the Blobs appear by attaching them to a mesh or any point source. Blobs are fully integrated into the rendering pipeline – they are rendered just like any other surface – therefore Blobs work with features such as global illulmination, disper-sion, blurry reflections, and motion blur.

Blobs

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Yazan Malkosh

In modo 601 particles are either discrete vertices that act as point sources for Replicators, or clouds of vertices which in turn form Blobs, Volumes or Sprites. Much like modo’s existing Painting Tool, which allows users to apply color onto a surface, the new Particle Paint Tool allows users to spray particles onto a surface in an intuitive and controllable manner. Sculpt-ing tools like Move and Spin provide additional control over the arrangement of particles.

Particle Painting/Sculpting

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Martin Mayer

Sprite Volume items let you very efficiently fill a sphere, cube or cylinder with camera-facing billboard images that are rendered using the Volume item ren-dering technique.

Volumetric Sprites

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Jason Bickerstaff

Luxology wishes to thank all of the beta testers who provided feedback during the development of modo 601 and imagery for this tour.

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Yazan Malkoshh