Foundry announces strategic decision to wind down development of Modo

thomasp

https://www.foundry.com/news-and-awards/foundry-winds-down-modo-development

Relevant to the - (checks notes) - three users this software still has in game dev. You are seen! We stand with you.

Also moving software sucks. Holding on to some museum piece from years back that lacks all the modern goodies and refuses to run properly on your OS does too though.

zetheros

!!!

sacboi

Well that's indeed a pity I've marveled over mind blowing HS stuff made with it, especially from artists like Tor Frick for instance, even gave it a crack myself though personally found both it's UI/UX a tad fiddly and rather nonsensical at times, respectively to what I'm normally used too.

thomasp

For hard-surface/sub-d it seems like quite the loss indeed. Lightwave - but with edge support. Also for Mac users - one down, one to go.

Oh well, there's always Blender *cough* (unironically).

myclay

The writing was on the wall ever since they got sold and bought so often by stock market holding groups.The Death Nail in my view was the public announcement(must be around 1st quarter of 2018 or so) from the owners HG Capital in regards of what products are and aren´t profitable, going so far to single out Modo as not "being in line with their investment plan".

If you use NUKE, you are fine, any other product? good luck and EOL for that.

Back in June this year, Foundry staff did video calls with companies and Indies/individuals which they know are longtime customers and tried to up-sell them Modo. They didn´t gave it a thought on moving back to perpetual licenses and my wallet closed while we where in the talk.

It also didn´t help their companies reputation that their service staff was atrocious in 2024. Customers who are active in the official forum and also affected reported the bad treatment.

As an example; We signed papers, they voided the old license, sent me a temporary license and then silence.
I went a week or so without being able to use my purchased and paid software since the assigned staff to my ticket went into holidays and didn´t forward their open tickets to others. All that among other things devalued their products worthiness.

I will also consider dropping Mari soon. They so far fail(ed) to address to implement important filetype support which is needed in my software combination.

User perception is important and Foundry and their various changing owners fumbled it in many aspects.

EDIT;
There is an End of life extended license available, valid 10 years from Nov 7, 2024 for any version of Modo up to Modo 17.1.
This can be downloaded and activated anytime up until 31st October 2025
https://campaigns.foundry.com/modo-eol-license

thomasp

"How will we crystallise value?"

..."attractive acquisition target"...

I love it. You couldn't get more cliche even if you tried. Shareholder value guys! See you at the earnings call.

Line is going down you fools...

PolyHertz

Just heard about this today. Sad news, but expected.
Modo had a very dedicated following under Luxology, but a good chunk of its userbase hated Autodesk and/or The Foundry, so of course when the acquisition happened the community effectively collapsed. It didn't help that the forums were soon gutted, and the Modo podcast was discontinued (which had been quite popular under Brad Peebler).

I haven't used Modo since version 701, but I remember really liking its navigation and modeling features. I thought the 'Work Plane' was a lot more user friendly then the 3D cursor found in Blender, and the Topology Pen was very powerful. The kit bashing features were also great. But I really hated how often tools would create bad geometry that required the 'Mesh Cleanup' feature to fix. Also although I never tried it, I heard the animation system was very slow and not particularly well thought out (which I imagine was a big part of why it never became a real threat to Max/Maya even under Luxology).

I'd love to see it go open source, as I think with some work it could become a real competitor to Blender, but I expect that'll never happen unless there's a major community effort to buy it from the company first (like what happened with Blender). And of course, the company itself would rather bury it then do something good natured like that (same as what Autodesk did to XSI).

Eric Chadwick

As much as I’d love to see it go open source, my guess is it would probably require a major effort to convert such a large long-running commercial code base over to OSS.

Likely they’re encumbered by sublicensed chunks of various components which would never fit GPL or similar.

Large codebases are usually a messy hodgepodge built by a huge cast of ever-changing contributors.

thomasp

Modo's codebase might actually be workable since it is a "young" application compared to the usual dinosaurs. As I remember it was a 2004-era restart of Lightwave modeler with some of the original developers and supposedly with lessons learned taken into account.

Question is if there'd even be anybody really interested in digging in and maintaining it. I don't think Modo ever did anything unique in 3D, it was just another Sub-D modeler for people with a Lightwave bent.

Neither Sub-D nor 3d app development in general strike me as hot topics in the year 2024. I guess talented coders with time on their hands would generally lean towards AI or whatever trendy topic there is these days?

PolyHertz

Yea, as powerful as Modo was, its design is simply not enticing to the vast majority of modern 3D artists. We've fully entered the age of art automation with AI, smart materials, auto retopology, etc. so for a tool to succeed it needs to be either heavily automated or be streamlined to the point where someone can get comfortable with it in a day or two. A DCC app that tries to do everything but has no unified vision is a very tough sell these days, no matter how great its individual features may be.

thomasp

On the PC I only ever encountered single users here and there and they were a pretty rare breed. I guess Modo might have had more of an audience on the Mac but it won't be enough to keep it around in some form.

Just checked the Foundry forums first time after years and am almost surprised to see that Mari is still alive and kicking. I think that may end up on the chopping block too at some point - seems incredibly niche now next to Substance Painter, like the inhouse software to tackle a very specific problem that it started as. Years back in their forum I was told by staff that at the time they had just a tiny team working on it too. Like two guys doing the coding and one responsible for QA or something like that.

Eric Chadwick

Past acquisition of the Foundry laid it pretty bare, saying Modo wasn't meeting revenue targets. Let's see what else gets shaved off.

https://www.cgchannel.com/2019/03/roper-technologies-acquires-foundry/ 

PolyHertz

From what I've heard Mari is still the standard in many big VFX studios due to how it allows painting on very large textures (16K-32K), and can use nearly unlimited UDIM tiles (substance has issues over about 30 tiles supposedly). That said, I tried it a few years ago and found it to be almost impenetrably complex compared to basically every other painting app, very much in line with the old school design mentality of "everyone loves reading gigantic manuals".

thomasp

PolyHertz said:

From what I've heard Mari is still the standard in many big VFX studios due to how it allows painting on very large textures (16K-32K), and can use nearly unlimited UDIM tiles (substance has issues over about 30 tiles supposedly). That said, I tried it a few years ago and found it to be almost impenetrably complex compared to basically every other painting app, very much in line with the old school design mentality of "everyone loves reading gigantic manuals".

Yes its a complex thing that turns 3D texture painting into its own fulltime job. Not sure if its still the standard beyond creature texturing. From what I'm hearing it seems Substance has been making inroads for most types of assets and surely everyone prefers actually painting the surface directly and having full material preview.

Just downloaded the non-commercial Mari to give it another spin but last time around that was all about painstakingly moving from one texture projection to the next with some very oldschool viewport display. And if you wanted to mirror paint it had to be done on the UVs, requiring a perfectly symmetrical layout. Mental.

PolyHertz

Yea, the lack of topological symmetry in Mari is/was really weird, it's not even that difficult to implement (in general). I don't think Modo had a proper index-based topological symmetry system either when I used it, though it did have one based on vert positions (which of course broke all the time since float values are fundamentally imprecise).

iam717

Entered those Modo contests back in the days to test run the application and i loved the modeling choices, sucks to hear, guess community only driven projects can't cut, investor based ones?  

(yes money but paypal, onlyfans+ and peeps wanting something to last as long as they get theirs, $.)

(basically saying, how do we prevent this from happening in the future since this has become a trend now-a-days.)

Milkshape3D is still alive or at least has been in the last 6 months and that was known about for me since the early 2000's, "their" doing it...

thomasp

Hmmm, difficult to parse. Well, if it's between using Milkshape3D and using Onlyfans.. I'd opt for the latter! See you there, fellas. And ... fellines? Anyway I will make it worth your while.

Bek

stopping by to say RIP to a legend, thanks for all the good times. Glad I started shifting to blender a year or so ago.