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Modo coming to linux?

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Bek
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Bek interpolator
Saw this on facebook, posted by Luxology modo page:

885296_10151466930743686_648851643_o.png

Caption is: Like penguins?

If modo comes to linux, and if xnormal 4 does too, then we will certainly be living in interesting times. I'd love to be able to move to linux but obviously there's a lot of programs that would need porting to linux (I doubt there are m(any) game-artists that use linux + blender or something at the moment), and drivers are still way behind, but this is a step in the right direction for me.

^ Terrible sentences because am excite.

Replies

  • Fingus
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    Fingus polycounter lvl 11
    I just put Linux on my old Macbook Pro because it's retired and I've been wanting to try out Linux for a while. Being able to use it for art would be an interesting experiment.

    Man, Linux has been getting a lot of love from software developers lately.
  • Kwramm
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    Kwramm interpolator
    Interesting. I keep wondering how feasible/possible it is to develop a 3D game entirely with free (not necessarily open source) software and without writing an engine from scratch.
  • JamesWild
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    JamesWild polycounter lvl 8
    Hmmm... good as it is, I doubt they'll see a return on investment here. Been experimenting with Linux myself, believe me when I say their support costs will be through the damn roof. Unstable drivers, weird bugs all over the shop. Psst, want to crash the graphics driver on most ATi hardware? Open vertex paint mode on Blender and select more than 16 faces.
  • Farfarer
    Yes, it's coming to Linux.

    I don't think it's aimed at personal users, though. Lots of biiig VFX houses run on Linux. Also makes for cheaper, faster, easier render farms, too.
  • Shadownami92
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    Shadownami92 polycounter lvl 7
    I would definitely see render farms as one of the biggest uses for this. Also, if your thinking about making games for Linux with a free game engine. I remember Wolfire's Mojam game called Low-Light tried exporting to Linux and their exporter seemed to not really work and other developers in their stream chat also commented on other Unity game's Linux versions not really working either. So that's probably something to keep in mind for that, at least for now.
  • Kraftwerk
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    Kraftwerk polycounter lvl 18
    Hmm thats good news, hope a few others jump on the ship as well would surely not mind kicking Windows of my PC and just stick with Fedora from now. And bad Linux drivers is kinda wrong these days, nVidia always worked quite good and thx to Valve they are even more solid lately and very very fast OpenGL, for AMD well thats there fault, also there always badly behind recent Xorg versions, why i dont touch there gpus, not to mention all these Maya issues back then -_-
  • MrOneTwo
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    MrOneTwo polycounter lvl 12
    [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHY3b1BPbU0&feature=share&list=UUf4p-GPl9WVy2_Q1NcDY7jw"]MODO 701 Particles in action... - YouTube[/ame]

    Modos logo in Foundry style in bottom right corner! I know it's not a shocker but I'm interested what this fusion will bring to the table.
  • JamesWild
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    JamesWild polycounter lvl 8
    Kraftwerk wrote: »
    Hmm thats good news, hope a few others jump on the ship as well would surely not mind kicking Windows of my PC and just stick with Fedora from now. And bad Linux drivers is kinda wrong these days, nVidia always worked quite good and thx to Valve they are even more solid lately and very very fast OpenGL, for AMD well thats there fault, also there always badly behind recent Xorg versions, why i dont touch there gpus, not to mention all these Maya issues back then -_-

    I completely beg to differ, and a month after switching you will too. Valve are bluffing for sure to try and maintain their desktop games monopoly in the face of having some actual competition for the first time in years. There's no way identical code would run so much faster on Linux than on Windows. Faster, maybe, but not by much. Wonder if they rewrote their Windows/DX renderer today using newer features and better architecture it'd go as fast. Probably would.

    For goodness' sake, I have to hex edit EDID dumps to use my monitor's native resolution on my nVidia desktop, and the drivers on my ATi/AMD laptop are hilariously unstable. Everything from basic operations hanging the driver to some multimonitoring configurations misaligning screens and adding a line or two of static along the top/bottom. And it's been like that for a good two years now, I don't forsee it ever being fixed. No problems in Windows.

    It's not a bad OS really, really quite cool for development, but for 3D in particular it just has far too many bugs all up and down the spectrum. Look before you leap.
  • illo
    http://www.luxology.com/store/special_offers/

    last line of the special offers.

    also you have some serious bad luck james, I havent had any of those problems with kde or Gnome.
  • Bek
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    Bek interpolator
    Interesting!

    Going up in price too it seems: "New licenses of MODO 701 will increase to $1495 and new floating licenses of MODO 701 will increase to $1795."
  • Slum
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    Slum polycounter lvl 18
    Linux is the main platform for Nuke, which is run by The Foundry (who just bought Luxology). So, making their flagship 3d product run on their main platform is pretty good business. Cool stuff.
  • Farfarer
    Bek wrote: »
    Interesting!

    Going up in price too it seems: "New licenses of MODO 701 will increase to $1495 and new floating licenses of MODO 701 will increase to $1795."
    Yeah, that sucks a little. Thankfully upgrade prices aren't affected this release.
  • coldside
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    coldside polycounter lvl 10
    Slum wrote: »
    Linux is the main platform for Nuke, which is run by The Foundry (who just bought Luxology). So, making their flagship 3d product run on their main platform is pretty good business. Cool stuff.

    Just to clarify, Luxology wasn't bought out, they have gone into a partnership with The Foundry.
  • Bellsey
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    Bellsey polycounter lvl 8
    coldside wrote: »
    Just to clarify, Luxology wasn't bought out, they have gone into a partnership with The Foundry.


    Actually, I think you'll find they merged - http://www.fxguide.com/featured/foundry-and-luxology-merge-fxg-exclusive/
  • cptSwing
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    cptSwing polycounter lvl 11
    Wow, that's a steep price increase.
  • WarrenM
    It's still a third of the price of Max. :P
  • PolyHertz
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    PolyHertz polycount lvl 666
    iirc they increase the price for every major release just to get people to pre-purchase it before the bump. I have to wonder how bad this strategy might hurt them in the long run, especially once they get near parity with AD product prices.

    Linux support is nice for those that use it, but to me the only things they've mentioned for 701 that sound interesting are:

    -Schematic improvements, reducing scene graph complexity.
    -Simplified complexity of materials and layered shaders

    Will be interesting to see what they changed there. But honestly all I really want to see atp is a proper fix for the double-vert/edge/face problem instead of relying on the band-aid script "Mesh Cleanup". I pretty much had to hotkey that 'fix' last time I tried Modo because its modeling tools create broken geometry continuously no matter how you work. Fixes to the ever-broken symmetry would be nice too.
  • leilei
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    leilei polycounter lvl 14
    Kwramm wrote: »
    Interesting. I keep wondering how feasible/possible it is to develop a 3D game entirely with free (not necessarily open source) software and without writing an engine from scratch.

    Totally feasible, but don't be surprised if you notice a lack of willing contributors that use the said free software. :)
  • Farfarer
    PolyHertz wrote: »
    iirc they increase the price for every major release just to get people to pre-purchase it before the bump. I have to wonder how bad this strategy might hurt them in the long run, especially once they get near parity with AD product prices.

    Linux support is nice for those that use it, but to me the only things they've mentioned for 701 that sound interesting are:

    -Schematic improvements, reducing scene graph complexity.
    -Simplified complexity of materials and layered shaders

    Will be interesting to see what they changed there. But honestly all I really want to see atp is a proper fix for the double-vert/edge/face problem instead of relying on the band-aid script "Mesh Cleanup". I pretty much had to hotkey that 'fix' last time I tried Modo because its modeling tools create broken geometry continuously no matter how you work. Fixes to the ever-broken symmetry would be nice too.
    I very rarely have issues with broken geometry. Guess it depends how you model - I've been using modo from version 1 so I'm pretty used to it's ability to let you create geometry that other programs would consider "illegal". And 99% of the time that's my own stupid fault for welding two polygons to the same 4 verts...

    Symmetry's sometimes a bit flaky but definitely not "ever-broken". It's not hard to fix it, either.
  • WarrenM
    To be fair, symmetry is pretty broken. I almost never turn it on because I KNOW that at some point it's going to stop working and I won't notice and then I'm screwed. And why can't it work across an arbitrary work plane? Having it ONLY work across the world origin really limits it's usefulness. Working across the workplane would open up it's usefulness 10 fold. Easily.

    And maybe it IS a workflow thing but I have Seneca's fix mesh script bound to a key I can easily hit because I must hit it 50 times a day. It's not a huge hassle as it fixes whatever is wrong but, yeah, I hit it a lot.
  • PolyHertz
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    PolyHertz polycount lvl 666
    I remember getting broken geometry on just about every tool I used, though it often wasn't apparent immediately. At some point I just started bringing up the Cleanup script after every single tool use to see if it found anything to fix, and about 1/3 of the time it did. Bridge, Slice, connect, extrude, etc. all did it.

    For Symmetry, what I meant by ever-broken was that its had problems that have been with it for ages that never seem to get fixed. I've given Modo a shot every new version starting with 301 years ago, and Symmetry has remained consistently buggy through every version I've used.
  • Overlord
    Kwramm wrote: »
    Interesting. I keep wondering how feasible/possible it is to develop a 3D game entirely with free (not necessarily open source) software and without writing an engine from scratch.

    Well, we have:

    Blender 3D
    Gimp
    Audacity
    Unity 3D/UDK/Cryengine/Blender engine Edit: Sauerbraten

    That seems like plenty of software to get you started making games without spending a dime. You could even go fully Linux with Sauerbraten as your engine.
  • Farfarer
    Mostly the Symmetry Tool will fix up any issues that arise. I remember it being buggy for stuff like slicing and things way back, but I've not had any issues recently.

    Warren... just tested and symmetry works for me across an altered workplane and across reference axes (hit the spot in the Items list beside your mesh item, it will align the world axes to the item's local axes, hit it again to go back to regular world axes)...
  • WarrenM
    Huh ... I must be doing something wrong because I get no action there at all. Only world axis. Odd.
  • dtschultz
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    dtschultz polycounter lvl 12
    Yeah, I have had the same issue in the past, and recently ran into it again the other day with a piece I am making for the Escape contest. I tried to fix symmetry by deleting half of the object and re-aligning it. I tried making a custom workplane, but I couldn't get it to work. I finally ended up using a mirrored instance. It's sort of like the symmetry modifier in Max, except for the seam.
  • Kraftwerk
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    Kraftwerk polycounter lvl 18
    JamesWild wrote: »
    I completely beg to differ, and a month after switching you will too. Valve are bluffing for sure to try and maintain their desktop games monopoly in the face of having some actual competition for the first time in years. There's no way identical code would run so much faster on Linux than on Windows. Faster, maybe, but not by much. Wonder if they rewrote their Windows/DX renderer today using newer features and better architecture it'd go as fast. Probably would.

    For goodness' sake, I have to hex edit EDID dumps to use my monitor's native resolution on my nVidia desktop, and the drivers on my ATi/AMD laptop are hilariously unstable. Everything from basic operations hanging the driver to some multimonitoring configurations misaligning screens and adding a line or two of static along the top/bottom. And it's been like that for a good two years now, I don't forsee it ever being fixed. No problems in Windows.

    It's not a bad OS really, really quite cool for development, but for 3D in particular it just has far too many bugs all up and down the spectrum. Look before you leap.

    Im using Linux since SuSe Linux 6.0 soooo i seen a LOT, about the OpenGL performance i am not just talking about Valves engine even though at the current state is works a lot faster under Linux, ohh and btw Valve wrote a very nifty wrapper to translate a lot of there DX code to OpenGL so its kinda impressive that its not even 100% native Linux code and still works better.

    Anyway back to topic, i played Quake 3 Arena on Linux back then and guess what, even back then it was faster at least 25 fps if i recall right. Current gen Ungine run about 3-6 FPS faster on my current hardware. Unreal Tournament 2004 always was about 10-15 FPS ahead, the original UT was kinda working crap back then. Maya was also quite a joy under Linux even though i have to admit Maya 7.0 was the last one i tried under Linux.

    nVidia never gave me much trouble a few ubuntu releases i had to manually tweak the xorg.conf but since the quite a few version this is really gone for me.

    Well and ATI/AMD they suck and will prolly always do i didnt even have a good time with there Windows drivers, again why i wont touch there stuff anymore, shame though good hardware in it self.

    Multi monitoring ok thats also kinda an issue still but considering Wayland gets a heavy push and nVidia likely supporting Wayland natively soon as well this should be sorted in the future.

    So all in all i would it call an useable OS for 3D, if enough software vendors gonna go to Linux, the driver issues will also be solved when nVidia and AMD see enough cash in Linux to bother.
  • oXYnary
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    oXYnary polycounter lvl 18
    Kraftwerk wrote: »
    Multi monitoring ok thats also kinda an issue still but considering Wayland gets a heavy push and nVidia likely supporting Wayland natively soon as well this should be sorted in the future.

    From what I read nVidia has no interest in suporting wayland with its closed source drivers. Ubuntu has dropped support with their own Mir.

    http://www.pcworld.com/article/2030053/with-convergence-in-mind-ubuntu-linux-scraps-wayland.html

    I dont know what Modo plans to concentrate on, but since Valve has stated Ubuntu will be the initial port to work. While needing closed source drivers for the gpus full potential.

    Wayland may be sol. Even if redhat will support it.
  • Kraftwerk
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    Kraftwerk polycounter lvl 18
    oXYnary wrote: »
    From what I read nVidia has no interest in suporting wayland with its closed source drivers. Ubuntu has dropped support with their own Mir.

    http://www.pcworld.com/article/2030053/with-convergence-in-mind-ubuntu-linux-scraps-wayland.html

    I dont know what Modo plans to concentrate on, but since Valve has stated Ubuntu will be the initial port to work. While needing closed source drivers for the gpus full potential.

    Wayland may be sol. Even if redhat will support it.

    http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTE5MTk

    An older news about it but apparently some insider have heard nVidias interest has gotten bigger about this case lately.

    ubuntu stands absolutely alone with Mir, all other distros will likely use Wayland, will be interesting to see however if nVidia will support Mir that might change the game. In any case this small war between Wayland and Mir might be useful (since both sides will do a lot effort to win out). Both nVidia and AMD have to either join Wayland or Mir sooner or later, because the big distros will use it either way sooner or later, Xorg is nightmare of code to maintain everyone in the Linux field knows that and how important a more modern, small and faster solution is.
  • Snefer
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    Snefer polycounter lvl 16
    oh man, I dont know how you guys are modelling though, I never get borken geometry of any kind, and I dont break symmetry either : S Never, ever use cleanup-scripts either, maybe its just because i'm not used to model like in maya or max so i dont break stuff by expecting something else to happen. Except for a few scripts that doesnt support symmetry.
  • dtschultz
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    dtschultz polycounter lvl 12
    Snefer wrote: »
    oh man, I dont know how you guys are modelling though, I never get borken geometry of any kind, and I dont break symmetry either : S Never, ever use cleanup-scripts either, maybe its just because i'm not used to model like in maya or max so i dont break stuff by expecting something else to happen. Except for a few scripts that doesnt support symmetry.

    Yeah, I'm sure this is true. I used Modo before Max, but now I've gotten so used to Max (and I don't use it at work), so I probably haven't given it enough time to relearn the way Modo wants me to work.
  • Fingus
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    Fingus polycounter lvl 11
    What is so different about the way you model in Modo anyway? I've used it a bit but I've yet to dig really deep into it.
  • WarrenM
    Snefer wrote: »
    oh man, I dont know how you guys are modelling though, I never get borken geometry of any kind, and I dont break symmetry either : S Never, ever use cleanup-scripts either, maybe its just because i'm not used to model like in maya or max so i dont break stuff by expecting something else to happen. Except for a few scripts that doesnt support symmetry.
    I find that hard to believe. :) I can just be working along and suddenly the sub-d will have a weird vert problem ... I hit my hot key to clean up the mesh and it corrects itself. I do this several times a day.
  • Snefer
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    Snefer polycounter lvl 16
    WarrenM wrote: »
    I find that hard to believe. :) I can just be working along and suddenly the sub-d will have a weird vert problem ... I hit my hot key to clean up the mesh and it corrects itself. I do this several times a day.

    Yeah, that sounds wierd to me actually ^^ I dont know, I would like to see what it is people are doing that causes these things, because im not quite sure what it means ^^
  • Bek
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    Bek interpolator
    Sometimes you'll make a mistake when removing edges that leaves behind vertices on the mesh, turning on vertice display or activating sub-d shows you where these are fairly quickly too. That's once instance I can think of where you can get unwanted verts.
  • Farfarer
    WarrenM wrote: »
    I find that hard to believe. :) I can just be working along and suddenly the sub-d will have a weird vert problem ... I hit my hot key to clean up the mesh and it corrects itself. I do this several times a day.
    Strange, I've not experienced that. Usually sub-d is a quick and easy way to check that your mesh is good.

    I think a lot of folk who come over from Max get confused, Max is odd in that it very easily lets you make sloppy models (even the cut tool will show that you're cutting from a vertex, but will actually make a second vert right next to the one you've picked) but at the same time has quite stringent rules on what you can and can't do with a mesh.

    Modo's sort of the opposite in that, as it doesn't have such stringent rules, it forces you to create very clean meshes.

    I dunno, I've used modo since 101. I remember having those issues way back at the start, but back then sometimes the tools could mess up symmetry. I guess I've learned to keep very high standards of mesh hygiene.
  • WarrenM
    It must just come down to work flows. They have "Mesh Cleanup" on the menu for a reason, so I'm clearly not the only one who experiences this. :P
  • leilei
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    leilei polycounter lvl 14
    Blender's not so cleaner anout it either. There's times when not even recalculating normals outside (after intense per-edge extruding and manual face making) helps things, especially when double sided is default for new objects so you don't know until much later, unless you pay attention to your normals' shading. Bit me in the ass many times when working on guns and hair.
  • Blaizer
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    Blaizer interpolator
    man, they are always increasing the price with each version and as a modeller i don't need any of the new features...

    Stucked with modo 302.
  • leilei
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    leilei polycounter lvl 14
    You could wait for a Steam daily deal, if it ever comes there :D
  • JamesWild
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    JamesWild polycounter lvl 8
    There's a "make normals consistent" feature for that - just select all your faces, hit space, type "make no" and hit enter.
  • Slum
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    Slum polycounter lvl 18
    coldside wrote: »
    Just to clarify, Luxology wasn't bought out, they have gone into a partnership with The Foundry.

    Kind of like Activision and Blizzard (in reality, Blizzard bought ATVI :P)
  • WarrenM
    I've watched a few tutorials now, good ones from places like Digital Tutors (for example), and Modo will do bad things to the mesh and the guy has to fix it. For those of you who never have trouble, I am jelly. :) But the problems go away with a button press so no biggie...
  • Blaizer
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    Blaizer interpolator
    I don't have issues working with very very high detailed meshes, how do you work with modo in order to need te mesh cleanup?
  • PolyHertz
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    PolyHertz polycount lvl 666
    I have a very hard time believing it has to do with workflow, if it's not happening universally it's much more likely that its an issue the program has with specific hardware/driver configurations. There's just no way that the average Modo user that doesn't get these issues is ignoring all the basic modeling tools and using nothing but obscure methods to construct their meshes.
  • WarrenM
    Look, there's a menu option for Mesh Cleanup for a reason. :)
  • MrOneTwo
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    MrOneTwo polycounter lvl 12
    I had some problems when I started using Modo. I learned how it responses to its tools and now I get less geometry problems than I did. Still it happens. Like Warren said its there for a reason but I don't think its a huge issue.
  • Bek
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    Bek interpolator
    WarrenM wrote: »
    Look, there's a menu option for Mesh Cleanup for a reason. :)
    Is there? Under what menu and what version of modo? I've just got senecas scripts menu bound to a key in 501.
  • WarrenM
    Geometry > Mesh Cleanup

    It's been there since, I think, 501. It's basically Seneca's script made official.

    But I too have a key bound to the latest Seneca script because it does a few things that the menu one doesn't like unify the sub-d across a mesh and stuff like that.
  • PolyHertz
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    PolyHertz polycount lvl 666
    Actually they included it starting with 601, but yea it's based on Senecas script.

    Speaking of scripts, when I tried writing some simple context sensitive tools with Perl hardly anything worked. I asked support about it and they basically told me they had no idea what was wrong as there was nothing wrong with my code. So yea, Modos scripting has some issues too, at least with Perl.
  • Farfarer
    I do my modo scripting in Perl (although I may move to Python if the 701 python speedups are significant).

    What was the issue?
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