Modo 801 live: Last chance to sign up!

emmafoundry

MODO801 Live is happening today!
Thursday 24th April 2014 7.00pm - 8.30pm PT (Pacific Time)

Registration is easy, just follow this link for details.

Plus, if you are in the San Francisco Bay Area you can go to the event in person! Fill out your details here and join us for a beer.

Dataday

They will probably present some useful features that game artist can use, so its worth checking out.

PolyHertz

Rewritten snapping, cage baking, normals manipulation, and several improvements/additions to UV tools.

Looking good so far.

Bek

Please please please tell me you can now straighten UV's by polygons as you can in max. Also curious about the snapping changes; any more specific info?

MDiamond

They improved a lot of the animation/rigging tools too.

Dataday

The presentations so far havent really helped "sell" Modo. Would rather just them talk about the features in 801.

MDiamond

Agree. I would have preferred if the dude speaking super fast didn't spoiled all those improvements super quickly.

PolyHertz

Looks like it's available to buy now.

Bek wrote: »

Please please please tell me you can now straighten UV's by polygons as you can in max.

Asked, and doesn't sound like it:

Q: Is there a way to automatically straighten UV shells now like the "straighten selection" tool in max?
A: I'm not familiar with the Max tool, but there are no new automatic straightening tools in 801. There are several UV improvements in 801 include Conformal (ABF++) unwrapping, UV Merge and UV Symmetrize.

[Deleted User]

Presentation is really boring. Those guest guys are really not needed there. They talk to much and to long.

Animation improvements looks cool. Baking also nice.

Dataday

I agree, the presentations pretty much killed the momentum created by Brad and the nature of the event.

Pretty much want to turn it off now...

Heres the list of whats been added: http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/modo/latest-version/

PolyHertz

Yea other then the short feature ramble and the animation demo the presentation has been terrible.

Dataday

Cage baking, improved snapping, UV improvements and sculpting tools probably carry the most weight for game art.

PolyHertz

It is a bit disappointing there's still no custom viewport shaders though. Can just imagine how great it would be to have Marmoset2/UE4 quality shaders in the Modo viewport.

Dataday

PolyHertz wrote: »

It is a bit disappointing there's still no custom viewport shaders though. Can just imagine how great it would be to have Marmoset2/UE4 quality shaders in the Modo viewport.

I believe such developments are being held back due to the Mac OS just recently being openGL 4 friendly, but I totally agree with you. The viewport is one of the weaker areas with Modo. I would love to see a Marmoset viewport as well.

MDiamond

There's also a lattice deformer now, for those who begged for that feature.

JordanW

I wasn't able to get much information from the live video, the website is much better:

http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/modo/latest-version/#uv-unwrap

snapping improvements are nice,
UV improvements are nice for organics, easy flattening of multiple channels, their soft adjustments look like puppet warp from photoshop which is nice.

Cycle animation keys looks nice for creating walk cycles or looped anims.

I'm really hoping to see FBX improvements, it's not something usually listed as an 'added feature' but hopefully they're in there. FBX has been kind of a mess in modo.

I was hoping to see some character/rig improvements, although it looks like they're going to still rely on the Automatic Character Setup Kit, which is actually really nice to use but for whatever reason will not import into UE4

Bek

PolyHertz wrote: »

Asked, and doesn't sound like it

Thanks! And, damn. Oh well.

Just watching some of the videos. Snapping changes look good — Huzzah for being able to snap to instances, and multiple snap types at once.. hopefully this means it won't revert to Geometry snapping from vert snapping when changing selections (because damn that was annoying).

UV improvements, not too exciting... But hey, you can merge UV maps now...

Ah I see that's your axe in the Texture Baking video Dataday. Nice. For some reason the hd video doesn't load past 59 seconds; toggling hd off let me see the rest though. Do we know what tangent basis this 'cross product' is yet? Chances are I'll still do all my baking in xNormal (And all my asset viewing in tb2) which is why I'm not so worried about improvements to the viewport (although it would be nice); I'd rather see the crucial things looked at. Like FBX export, and other things that are central to modo and can't be fixed/replaced with third party apps.

Ah, the edge extend changes are nice (See general enhancements video, 1:45)

dmj

JordanW wrote: »

I'm really hoping to see FBX improvements, it's not something usually listed as an 'added feature' but hopefully they're in there. FBX has been kind of a mess in modo.

I was hoping to see some character/rig improvements, although it looks like they're going to still rely on the Automatic Character Setup Kit, which is actually really nice to use but for whatever reason will not import into UE4

I've been able to bring some basic rigs and animations into UE4 that I made in ACS, but I have to export using FBX 2010 rather than FBX 2013, which gives me an error saying my BindPose is invalid.

I did see in the chat tonight that work has been done on FBX in 801, so hopefully this will be fixed.

Dataday

Bek wrote: »

Ah I see that's your axe in the Texture Baking video Dataday.

If you are talking about the one here: http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/modo/latest-version/

That was done by the Foundry's Greg Brown.

Bek

Ah right, my bad! I'm going crazy.

Farfarer

Bek wrote: »

Please please please tell me you can now straighten UV's by polygons as you can in max. Also curious about the snapping changes; any more specific info?

Working on it. Got verts and edges finished yesterday. Just need to do polygons next.

Bek

Fantastic. That's going to save me so, so much time.

Farfarer

For edges and verts, it looks like these for options (can have any combination of these options except for having the middle two at "unchanged" - because nothing'll be altered then).

For edge selection, it works on each edge selection, for verts it works across all selected verts at once.



So, aligning between endpoints and spacing the vertices relative to their 3D edge length gets you something like this.

WarrenM

Those snapping improvements ... unless I'm missing something, I just can't get excited. Presets? Yaaaay... I guess.

fmnoor

It felt like the presentation was geared more to hobbyists and was not very compelling to me. I also felt very.. underwhelmed at the "oh and it works great for games" component with the Ouya demo they showed off.

The animation keyframing was cool though. And free beer on the house.