To Modo or not to Modo?

cookedpeanut

Being a Blender user myself, I'm looking to advance into a more "Commercial" oriented software package.
Blender itself is coming along really well, with the addition of a few scripts it can be turned into a fairly feature rich program - however it feels a little undeveloped with its tools.

I tried 3DSMax and Maya but I found the interface to be a little confusing, then I tried Modo and everything seemed to just 'CLICK' for me. But my question is on whether Modo is a well developed, feature rich program that offers comparable performance to Max? Am I losing out on anything?

My main interest is hard surface modelling so I guess I'm looking for something that offers lots of candy for that area.

What are your thoughts? Have you used Modo?

Ta

wichenroder

You should take a look at this thread over at the modo forums.

I love Modo, but it has some shortcomings if it's game dev you're doing.

For hard surface modeling you might miss the kind of control migNormal Tools gives you in Maya... or you might not. Otherwise you're pretty well covered, and the UV tools are excellent.

Stinger88

I'm interested in Modo also. I have nothing to add really but i'll be watching the thread.

I'd be interested to hear more about the animation side of things and how it compares to Maya's animation.

Bek

I've been using modo for about a year now, previously I'd dabbled with max. It was a pretty jarring change at first, but I got used to it fairly quickly and was soon making much more complex stuff than I had in max. The tools just really clicked for me too.

For game dev I agree with all that stuff in the linked thread.. One other thing I'd add is the option to disable drawing edges in the UV esp, I'd like to be able to just export the UV borders.

I would say Modo crashes more than max, although usually it's when I've been doing something funky / stupid. Occasionally for no good reason at all. This is on 501 sp4. The Autosaving is pretty good though, I usually don't lose much progress.

Someone more experienced will be able to answer questions regarding max vs modo for subD stuff, I can't imagine there being many significant differences. Modo has catmull-clark subdivision as well which is quite useful, generally handles tris / poles better than regular subD.

edit: Actually another good thing I can say about modo is it's performance, it's never felt sluggish to me, loads within a second or two. Okay, maybe three for the first run.

Also, the renderer is pretty awesome. I found it quite simple to get really nice results.

Gestalt

I've been interested in Modo for a long time, and have a lot of hope for it as far as modeling goes, but unfortunately I don't have $1.2k just sitting around to see if it does anything significantly different from my already functioning programs. There's a trial, but even that (for the full features) costs money.

I know there are nice features, but I'm not sure if there's anything you can't find elsewhere in some form. I guess the strength is in the implementation, which I've heardnis well developed, but I can't really comment or be of much specific help due to lack of experience. Realistically it's infeasible for me, especially with perfectly fine free alternatives, but I've heard and seen good things about it. This probably isn't the most helpful response...

warinmysky

I was tossing and turning on trying to weigh out if it was smart to make the move or not (as a fellow Maya user.) I think the honest answer is, what exactly your trying to accomplish?

Personally I've been working freelance and contract with using 3D in more than just games (Arch Vis, Product Design, etc), so the decision to make the jump was pretty easy. (That, and It just happened to go on their conversion sale thing, so I ended up getting it for 3 or 400 less than their full price.)

I WILL say, that after the initial "grind" period of just getting used to the app, It's definitely my program of choice. Modo's rendering is amazing (And was perfect for some one like me who was never truly well-versed at MentalRay or Vray, etc.) It just simply got the job done to make some nice looking renders.

It's all personal preference at this point (in choosing your app) because they all generally do the same thing. I opted for Modo, which was excellent for modeling and rendering which were things that I needed to be more efficient at. I've even become so accustomed to "Modo Navigation" I find myself tripping with the standard Alt navigation of Maya!

As mentioned before though, Game Dev at this point DOES have drawbacks. However, I LOVE how close-knit and helpful the members on the lux forums are. There are plenty of scripts that help you get the job done (for game dev). I HAVE tried and tested many of the game-dev scripts out there and they do in fact work. I think most peoples argument (and not wrongfully so) is that there are many Game Dev features that SHOULD be supported right out of the box, instead of people having to dig up and make scripts to do those things.

All in all, if your on the fence, weigh your options. If your strictly doing Game Dev, then I'd probably stick to Maya or Max. If your doing other areas of 3D, I'd say take the plunge with Modo. I'm hoping for some awesome improvements on their next version (and who knows, it just MIGHT actually make the difference in the Maya, Max, Modo battle!) if lux pulls it off right

bisenberger

modo has recently partnered with the Foundary. There are mixed feelings about what this might mean for the future of modo as evidenced by this thread on the Luxology forum:
http://forums.luxology.com/topic.aspx?f=4&t=70239

Farfarer

Honestly I love modo. It's my modeling/retopo/UVing tool of choice. Even managed to get some decent sculpts in it.

At the moment, it's probably not as fully-featured as Max is, but most of the features it's lacking I don't use in Max anyway or only use once in a blue moon.

For my Unity3D games, it's all I use. I've ditched Max entirely as it's just not needed in my pipeline any more.

Modo does fall down on some deeper technical issues for game dev (smoothing groups are unintuitive and editing vertex normals by hand is near-impossible - you're pretty much left with a smoothing angle per material) and there's no animation layers yet, which is a bit of a pain and I imagine it's a bit of a deal-breaker for some, but I've done alright to work around these things as the rest of the program is so intuitive and well-built.

As for stability, the latest 601 SP3 seems pretty solid. I've only had it crash on me once since I installed it (and I was messing around with about 24 million polygons, so it's understandable).

EarthQuake

I love love love love Modo, but I only use it for certain things:

I use it for Highpoly Sub-D, Lowpoly, UVs, and for doing sweet renders of my HP meshes.

I do not use it for: setting up lowpoly mesh normals(hard edges/smoothing groups), baking maps, exporting to game engines, etc. I work freelance and all of that stuff will be done in another app(Max and Maya, sometimes xnormal for bakes) to client preference.

If you're looking at Modo as a "suite" to replace a Max or Maya type app, you'll be disapointed. If you're looking at Modo for its awesome modeling tools, you'll be very happy. Though that is not to say other apps do not have awesome modeling tools. Max for instance can do certain things with the modifier stack that you can only dream of doing in Modo.

MrOneTwo

Just like EarthQuake I use it mostly for modelling and uving. It's fast and really comfortable. I especially like how uving works. Way better than how maxs uving works.

Not specifically for game art but it's a great package.

WarrenM

I've said many times that I love Modo. I use it as often as I can for modeling tasks.

Hang10

I was watching some clips of the training videos they have and i was impressed by the edge weighting and Pen topology tools.

igi

Modeling,UVing,Rendering in modo=Awesome

Baking,vertex normals and presentation in real time,not so much.Modo does not have averaged cage that's essential for a nice bake.You can either use max,maya or xnormal.I got no problems with its smoothing groups but it seems some people got problems with it.
Another positive thing is there's a lot of nice scripts that make your way even more easier. Modo modeling tools are so slick and fast imo.
Also,for viewport presentation you'll need some external real-time displayer like marmoset,there's no some nice shaders in modo like xoliul or 3pointshader that 3dsmax have.
I'm still calling for people who able to create one-click smoothing groups from uv shell script for modo.That definitely will be life-saver for me and probably most of us.

keelhauler

Love Modo for the things I do with it.
Modeling, UVs and HP rendering in Modo.

xNormal, Marmoset and Ariel Chai's pipelineIO helping on things where Modo sadly falls short. As much I like xNormal, would be nice to be able to do my baking work inside Modo.

Ability to do bakes and better painting are pretty much the only things I'm waiting from Modo at the moment.

@igi: With pipelineIO, it's one-click export with automatic HardEdges at uv borders.

MrOneTwo

I personally couldn't make pipelineIO to work right. It messed my geometry. Smaller geo scale and the distortions were bigger. I tired it on Modo 601.

For normals control I unfortunately go through 3ds max.

igi

Exactly.I give up using pipelineIO because I'm getting messy results in xnormal everytime.And vertex normals won't import correctly to UDK.It's sad thing,even though I didn't know that script has one click hardening option.

keelhauler

Only thing that has caused me problems with pipelineIO is the OS' decimal symbol. It needs to be '.' instead of ','. That's one if you are from europe etc.

Farfarer

Yeah, that bit me in the ass with my SMD exporter. Someone from Europe emailed me saying it wasn't working and it took me a while to figure out why...