Modo vs blender for pure modelling and texturing
For a variety of reasons I've switched work from a big AAA company/branch of MS to a small ios based games company. Fantastic change but money is much tighter and most of my work at home is now being done on an imac.
I can't afford/don't want to use Maya or max (my go to app for years) so am looking to move to either Blender or Modo going forwards.
My question is from a games creation perspective what's the actual difference between the two? I don't render or animate - I'm mainly wondering how their modelling and texturing holds up. Also little things like:
How well they bake (as I won't have xnormal)
How easily they do hard/soft edges
how alphas and textures are displayed
are they missing any obvious modelling tools that I'd miss coming from 3dsmax.
Oh and how good their import/export tools are.
Any help or advice in a non flame way would be welcome - I appreciate they're both great, both have their advantages and yes, theoretically I could learn both as one's free but time's at a premium...
I can't afford/don't want to use Maya or max (my go to app for years) so am looking to move to either Blender or Modo going forwards.
My question is from a games creation perspective what's the actual difference between the two? I don't render or animate - I'm mainly wondering how their modelling and texturing holds up. Also little things like:
How well they bake (as I won't have xnormal)
How easily they do hard/soft edges
how alphas and textures are displayed
are they missing any obvious modelling tools that I'd miss coming from 3dsmax.
Oh and how good their import/export tools are.
Any help or advice in a non flame way would be welcome - I appreciate they're both great, both have their advantages and yes, theoretically I could learn both as one's free but time's at a premium...
Replies
main downside to modo atm, is smoothing, but there are lots of 3rd party scripts to improve that.
also i found them both a little weak on texture bakeing, but your lucky since XNormal is free too.
+1
I have heard fantastic things about Modo's modelling - just seen numerous vids of Blender looking remarkably similar - without explanations its often hard to get a feel as to 'why' a particular app rocks. Silo for example and intuitive tools or 3dsmax for modifier stack and just the sheer amount of options...
It's very different from Max, though. But stick with it and it'll do you well.
As for your specific questions...
Baking doesn't have a projection cage (it's fixed distance based on vertex normals) but it's fast with a ton of outputs. I live with it, but I do use xNormal and Handplane for a lot of baking. Cage baking will hopefully arrive in 801.
Modo doesn't do soft/hard edges natively, but I wrote a plugin that just about handles that (and more) - http://forums.luxology.com/topic.aspx?f=83&t=77919
It's alpha sorting is pretty poor, it also uses opacity rather than transparency (so it's an inverted alpha map) and doesn't support alphatest in the viewport. Again, we've asked for improvements here but they likely won't make it in 'til 801.
Import/export is pretty decent. The 701 cycle is currently going through an FBX overhaul - adding FBX2013 support, written from scratch. The new FBX2013 doesn't support animation yet (although the other FBX options do) but it'll get added.
There aren't any tools from Max that I miss. Quite the opposite in fact
-Modos workplane is more powerful then Blenders 3D/2D cursor
-Selection methods are far more streamlined
-modeling tools are more consolidated
-better viewport performance
On the negative side, Modo has a weird issue for some people where geometry is constantly breaking, requiring near-continuous use of Mesh Cleanup (I had this issue). Another potential issue in the long term is that Luxology is suspect in whether they care about game artists and their needs at all: http://forums.luxology.com/topic.aspx?f=83&t=74782
To answer your questions directly:
Blender uses 'sharp edges' which are marked directly same as in Maya (instead of Maxs smoothing groups), then the edges are broken via modifier since split normals in the viewport is still being worked on. Up until recently you couldn't export them as hard edges, but thankfully that problem was just solved about a month ago.
Modos normals situation is a bit murky too, thankfully Farfarer wrote a nice plugin to take care of them (posted above).
Both Modos and Blenders viewport are very poor when it comes to anything beyond the most basic shaders. Theres nothing close to Xoliul or 3Point shader for them.
Modo has just about every important Max modeling tool. Blenders Edge Connect and Weld are worse then Maxs though (no pinch for connect, and no way to weld to the center with a tolerance).
Import/Export on Blender is fine, but on Modo you'll want to do a final Mesh Cleanup and check UVs before export (Modo doesn't keep a synced UV set for all mesh surfaces, so you could potentially end up exporting with missing UVs which will cause problems in many other apps).
Downloaded both today (have to love the price of blender... I give them that) and have started to have an initial poke around to see which seems to feel better.
My immediate thoughts are modo is set up better - blender, despite the changes still really really wants you to use a weird control scheme (you can change the keybindings to be more maya like but it causes you to lose everything - I need to have a poke around at specific navigation bindings to see if that improves things).
Both seem powerful but have moments of 'eh... really?'. Simply displaying a texture on an imported model in blender seems faffy for example while Modo's sculpturing and painting smell of half finished ideas (the sculpting is very sluggish on my machine while the painting seems not to have an obvious color picker so you can select off a model). Who knows though - I could be missing very obvious buttons in my early explorations!
What PolyHertz is on about is that modo allows you to create geometry that other programs would consider illegal. Edges can have more than two polygons on them and that means you can do things like create two identical polygons on top of each other. So modo will force you to create clean geometry or you'll be using the Mesh Cleanup tool a lot (which does a ton of fixing up).
Blender doesn't support hard edge export in any way, it hasn't been solved yet.
http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?291881-Exporting-OBJ-and-FBX-physically-break-edges-no-love-for-the-game-making-community
I just checked and you're right. The option to export Smooth Groups is there, which I'd seen and assumed wouldn't have been added to the stable release unless it was finished, but I guess that's not the case.
Personally I would use blender.
Honestly? Mainly the interface. I think Blender is an awesome app and my hats off to the user base and devs who have pushed it so far. Also certain features such as the sculpting feel miles better than the modo equivalent.
What's put me off from an initial view is the simple things. Navigation flies in the face of most other 3d apps for no particular reason bar legacy. Zbrush for example has a weird control system but works fantastically with a stylus so it makes sense. This just feels odd because it was odd years ago (for what its worth I think Max needs to suck it up and just switch navigational controls to the Maya ones). Blender feels like playing a first person shooter that uses r, z, t and b as the movement controls....
Also little things have been frustrating to get to grips with. Ideally in a new package I want to import in an obj, apply a texture and see how it looks. In modo this was utterly straightforward. In blender I still haven't figured out how to display a flat shaded texture in the viewport for easy modelling. Not saying it can't - just that a few hours fiddling have left me with either a white flat shaded model or a lit by scene light textured one.
I'll keep checking it out as I want to like it more than I do and the vids look great - but so far modo has been a much... smoother... initial jump in. It reminds me of ios apps in a way. You have a few seconds to grab my attention otherwise I'll probably check out a more friendly competitor.
ya blender does somet things very well, but with the exception of a few people like you, the community is hard to get along with. You mention industry standard stuff like making the controls more standard, or adopting hard and soft vertex normals like maya, and you just get trolled.
With the sculpt mode,I can easily move a lot of vertices around,after adding edge loops where I need them.Figuring Blender's materials and textures is quite confusing at first as its very different from Maya but I like how Materials and textures can be layered over each other.
Glsl mode as well gives better textures display in the viewport than Maya imo.
In future,the bge engine will be integrated into the viewport, that means powerful shaders,post processing,dynamic lighting,will be possible in the viewport.Its going to be like marmoset toolbag but with animation tools.
To get flat shaded textures,u have to tick shadeless in the material tab section after selecting ur object.
Blender's viewport on the other hand,does quite well.
So you figured out how to display a texture? That's farther than I got :P
I'm sure I'm not giving it the time it deserves to be fair - and I will but atm I'm aware I have less time to trial modo than I do blender
The control scheme should definitely be more... customizable imo for adopters. The more I don't have to think about why something ISN'T working and the more I can instantly go 'oh now this is cool' - then the more likely I am to stick with a package. I'm a big fan of 3dcoat, for example, and use it daily. The retopology was simple enough for me to get into the package and use it primarily as a retopolgy tool. Over time I began to branch out and use it for texturing and UVing. I suspect I wouldn't have done so if I hadn't had such a simple time in the retopo tools.
I should add that any time a package makes things complicated to begin with for the sake of options I tend to wince. Make it simple THEN give me options buried away so I can get to grips with it first. A gripe about modo is its snapping. It 'seems' to have a vast range of options but actually applying them is confusing compared to, say, maya which just works at a button press.
Oh and thanks for the tip about materials melviso - will check that out.
Ive yet to have an issue getting a model from Wings and into a game engine.
While I havent used maya or max enough to appreciate all the "easy button" plug-ins, I prefer Wings clean, no-frill interface.
I'm sure Modo beats it on all levels but if cash is tight, it's worth the time to check it out.
I don't really use it side from a few simple things - never spent the time to get deep into it.
It's not too cumbersome to use, X to toggle, F11 to open the snapping menu. There's also Edit > Snapping > Snaps Pallete for some extra tools. Background Constraints can also be pretty handy.
Still - getting more of a hang of it after a day making horribly messy geometry - mesh cleanup tool for the win. Definitely feels good and from reading about what its missing for games feels like it only needs a slight focus to really kick ass.
Generally a really nice package. The modelling options and retopology are excellent and there's very little that you can't lay out and or build quickly. Definitely recommended. The UV stuff is also world class.
My only minor gripes (well - mostly minor) were its too buttony in places. For all that it models brilliantly, it could do with more of a repeat command a la maya. It 'sort' of has one with ctrl+r or shift but its very flakey and only seems to work sometimes and with certain tools. So you end up doing a lot of fiddling between modes and selections. Minor grumble though.
More of a pain was the material editor and the viewport. Materials still feels a bit confusing - you can work in layers a la photoshop but on my imac at least the different modes (diffuse, overlay etc) don't display in real time even in advanced open gl mode which makes it crippled for non diffuse painting. Also the layout of the layers feels sort of un-intuitive compared to mudbox or 3dcoat which just... work. Really needs improving.
Oh and games wise cage baking is missing (but everyone uses xnormal so... not such a problem (then remembers his mac and weeps
But anyway - despite the mutters a REALLY good package and largely friendly to try out. Well worth checking out if you have a spare weekend.
If you select some items in the item list and right click on one of them, you should have the option to export selected layers.
At the moment it's mesh layers only - not skeletons/animation/etc. But if you're not doing animation in modo you should be OK.
And I really very highly recommend that you look into setting up some custom pie menus and keyboard shortcuts. Keep an eye on what you use a lot and definitely look to building pie menus for stuff. Once you get some set up to your own liking, modo really becomes a beast of it's own for straight up modelling - feels very streamlined.
Henning Sanden put up a nice intro to customising modo here - well worth a read;
http://henningsanden.com/2013/03/31/how-to-optimize-modo-for-faster-modeling/
I guess in an ideal world I wouldn't need those scripts as a lot of them merely add what amounts to sticky buttons to useful actions. Copy and move, for example is useful but odd that the package needs it. A lot of the faff I noticed seemed to come down to the movement and select tools being separate. If you could just select while the movement tool was down I'd be working faster.
Really my only two big complaints were the exports (which sounded like it can be scripted out of) and the viewport. Being unable to paint on blended layers in realtime was... eh.... not a winner and odd that it doesn't work when 3dcoat etc works so well. But hell - there's always app-links galore.
[ame="
RayGL (or Preview) is pretty much the closest you'll get to that.
Modo spotted. Ok it's not really on topic but it's pointless to create new one.
It is that because of Tor "Snefer" Frick working here now ?
http://forums.luxology.com/topic.aspx?f=32&t=77955
Will be having a longer look at blender over the next week or so for comparison. Anyone able to tell me what's missing before I waist time hunting for it? (I know it doesn't have cage baking for example).
In general:
Cage baking.
'Proper' hard / soft edge support.
Vertex normal editing.
Snap to exact increment.
The vertex normals and smooth groups issues should be fixed in a month or two. I feel like we're on the verge of having a decent package with Blender...as long as you use it with X-Normal. That said if you need a package right now go with Modo. It's a pretty slick package and has better modeling tools than Max or Maya. I will say that if you are using Unity then Blender should probably be your first choice with the quality of the importer/etc.
As far as using X-Normal on a Mac you can do it with Wine. I've used it successfully on Linux before. What you have to do is use the 3.17.3 release because after that they switched to .Net 4, which isn't implemented in Wine yet.
i wasnt serious, and dont want adesk anywhere near modo, but workflow and functionality wise, maya with some of modo's improvements, and all it;s tools would be kick ass.
meh... perhaps I'm just biased because of years of trying demos and still finding that the modelling bevel wasn't particularly interactive
I wasnt a big fan of Blender until not all that long ago. Good concept but it just felt under developed at the time. Then I took the time to really sit down with it, set up and use a keymap that seemed sane (Maya in this case) and dig in. Its come a long way since the 2.5 update.
Honestly, I have to say there is something enjoyable about working inside of Blender and following its development as each day goes by. You dont really have that with other applications, which generally tend to keep quiet until a big release is on the horizon.
With Blender, its all out in the open and test builds or features are constantly available for testing/usage. Every day new things are added to "the trunk". Pointing out a bug can get it fixed within a day and already be part of the latest downloadable build. For one such commit log, see: http://www.miikahweb.com/en/blender/svn-logs
I think you will be impressed with whats inside that somewhat messy interface (which will eventually get fixed). It wasnt that long ago that CG Cookie developed an addon with perhaps one of the easier workflows seen so far.
See: [ame="
More resources can be found here: http://cgcookie.com/blender/
Some time last night I saw that one of developers added improved FBX support in which smooth and hardened edges can be exported. See: http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?304646-FBX-importer-included-in-blender-ready-for-testing Post# 38
You can have access to many of the coders who constantly fix bugs and add to blender on irc.freenode.net #blendercoders (IRC channel), or ask questions for general discussion and support at irc.freenode.net #blender
I guess the impression I am trying to give is that it is perhaps the most active 3d content creation tool you will probably ever find, and because of that you get sucked in. Seeing the development, getting new and or varied builds to pick from every day, having access to a large chunk of the user base at any given time.. Its a nice feeling.
Not perfect yet though, but its evolving fast. The Blender Foundation just hired another full time developer and Valve has been communicating with them to get some form of blender to steamworkshop pipeline going while also allowing a bit of revenue to go towards further development of Blender.
Pretty neat stuff.
Oh and without further ado, a proposal from Ton regarding the future of Blender: http://code.blender.org/index.php/2013/06/blender-roadmap-2-7-2-8-and-beyond/
I havent come across a tool that doesnt work as expected, rather it seems no different than when I am working in maya or even modo. Some tools are by their very nature quirky.
Vertex Chamfer actually works fine, though its called Bevel in blender. The annoying thing with blender is that it has a little tool property box in the lower left, its easy to miss. So what you do is select the vert, bevel and then click in the lower left box the toggle that says "vertex only". This gives you the same result as Maya's vertex chamfer.
Check out the latest build as its quite solid. Still room for improvement though.
also poor support for exchange formats like fbx and alembic which makes collaboration very hard, still haven't been able to bring anything from maya to blender with it's animation and smoothing intact.
You actually have more control with this in Blender than Maya.
See:
There are some addons which allow variation of normal editing, but yes over all this is still an area thats being worked on. I believe Modo didnt allow splitting normals, or at least exporting them until someone made a plug in for it. I could be wrong on that part though.
See: http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?304646-FBX-importer-included-in-blender-ready-for-testing