Modo 14.1 View Release Notes

Advanced Viewport Ghost & Xray Support

Whether you’re modeling or animating, coherent and customizable visualization of geometry is essential. Ghost and Xray viewport modes help you see what you need, when you need it, letting you stay in the creative flow. Now if you want to visualize your scenes with Ghost & XRay you can enjoy the quality that the Advanced Viewport provides too.

Advanced Viewport Vertex Map Texture Support

Advanced Viewport Vertex Map Texture Support

Visualization of your Vertex Maps allows you to make fast decisions and edits without having to fiddle with parameters. Now you can visualize Weight Maps, UV Distortion, and Vertex Colors in the Advanced Viewport.

Advanced Viewport Improved Processing

Complex scenes can be a challenge to visualize at high quality. In Modo 14.1 the Advanced Viewport has been optimized for faster Shader Tree and Shader Group processing for better performance when working in complex models and environments.

 

AVP SpeedUp

 

UVRelax Mesh Op

Performance Improvements

Always striving to improve performance, Modo 14.1 brings a handful of performance improvements to speed up your daily work.The UV Relax Mesh Operation has been multi-threaded in Adaptive mode offering up to 5X speed increase when relaxing UVs. The Edge Remove operation has also been significantly improved for speed increases between 5 and 20 times.

Bevel Autoweld

Bevel Auto Weld

Worrying about overlapping geometry when beveling is a thing of the past with the new Bevel Auto Weld feature in Modo 14.1. A new option for polygon bevel, Auto Weld computes the border loop of selected polygons and then stops the inset vertices at a point of contact. Whether direct or procedural modeling Bevel Auto Weld is a really powerful tool many Modo modelers will appreciate.

Curve Sweep Point Mode

Curve Sweep has a new mode, allowing vertices of a mesh to be swept along a curve using Curve Sweep. Point mode brings exciting new versatility to Curve Sweep for making vertices into curves.

 

Curve Sheep Points

 

Polygon Bevel Falloff Controls

Falloffs are a powerful and flexible part of Modo’s workflow and you can now use them to control Polygon Bevel. Use all your favorite falloffs with Polygon Bevel Shift and Inset.

Bevel Falloff

 

Edge Chamfer

Edge Chamfer Extend Boundary

Sometimes you want to push past the boundary when Chamfering and the new Extended Boundary option in Edge Chamfer lets you do just that. The outgoing direction is computed by the outer face normal and edge vectors. This new enhancement is available both for procedural and direct modeling versions of Edge Chamfer.

Polygon Make Enhancement

Making simple operations smarter adds speed and agility to the modeling process. Polygon Make can now create a new quad polygon when only two edges are selected.

 

Polygon Make Quad

 

UV Relax Mesh Operation

UV Relax Mesh Operation

Get procedural with UVs using the UV Relax meshop. It can be used to refine an existing UV map in much the same way as the smooth tool is used to soften and regularize a model's surface.

Unwrap and Relax Mesh Operation

Unwrap and Relax is a powerful uber tool that makes quick work of complex UV tasks and is now available as a procedural Mesh Operation.

 

mPath Embree CPU path tracing

mPath Embree CPU path tracing

mPath takes full advantage of the latest multi core CPU systems hitting the market with the addition of Intel's Embree high performance ray tracing library. Embree enables faster ray tracing calculation for CPU platforms, including MAC.

mPath Optix 7 Update

GPU Ray Tracing on qualified NVIDIA hardware has been upgraded to use OptiX 7.

mPath is now significantly faster to render your ray traced scenes with NVIDIA OptiX 7. This update to mPath also adds support for ray tracing two-point polygons in OptiX—useful for rendering hair and fur.

mPath Optix 7

 

Automatic EIS

Simplicity can remove barriers and allow focus on the artwork at hand. Environment Importance Sampling (EIS) is now automated when rendering with mPath, based on whether any image maps are affecting the environment. Just another parameter not to worry about.

mPath AutoEis

 

mPath Denoise

Denoising Improvements

Denoising is an important part of a modern rendering workflow and mPath in Modo now offers two new options for denoising as well as improvements to the current Nvidia OptiX denoising.

Intel's Open Image Denoise is a new high-quality denoiser that uses AI to improve image quality on the host CPU, with no user parameters.

AMD AI is a new high-quality denoiser that uses AI to improve image quality on the GPU. It is most efficient on AMD hardware.

When looking for quick updates, Per Iteration Denoising can speed up your workflow by denoising the image between mPath iterations. It is currently available when using the Intel or OptiX denoisers.

PBRLoader

PBR Loader / Set Effects

PBR Loader allows you to rapidly load PBR textures created in other applications like Substance Designer into the shader tree. Quickly load in all related images, and then set their effect based on the effect in the name of the file.

Gaps by Pixel Enhancements

The UV Pack and UV Fit mesh ops now have new attributes to set the gaps size by pixel for 14.1.

 

Gaps Per Pixel

 

IK/FK Switching

IK/FK Switching

Switching between IK and FK can be cumbersome. The new IK/FK Switching with Planar IK lets you quickly match IK to FK and FK back to IK. When animating you can easily visualize your state with fading IK lines and a custom IK Goal for IK or FK.

Disable IK & Update Rest Pose

Sometimes you need to adjust your joints after Inverse Kinematics has been applied. Disable IK enables you to do just that by tweaking joint placement even after IK is set up. Both Full Body and Planar IK can now be disabled in Setup mode and commands have been added to update the Rest Pose of both types of IK chains.

Disable IK & Update Rest Pose

 

USD importer

USD Importer

The UsdModo plugin enables you to import assets authored with Pixar’s Universal Scene Description into Modo. Types of Geometry, Curves, Lights, Cameras, Material, and Animation are supported.

Modo 14.0 View Release Notes

Ghost/Xray View Display

Whether you’re modeling or animating, coherent and customizable visualization of geometry is essential. Ghost and Xray viewport modes help you see what you need, when you need it, letting you stay in the creative flow.

Add Point

Changes are inevitable. This is always true when being directed. Add point allows you to revise existing details on your model by reducing the number of loops along a curve, providing a streamlined method of updating your models when those inevitable changes are thrown your way.

Add point

Edge Chamfer Falloff Weight

Edge Chamfer is the in-progress replacement for our edge bevel tools. In 14.0 we’ve taken further steps towards feature completion by adding falloff support for chamfer operations. Users can now exploit this modifier on our brand new tool.

Edge Chamfer

Chamfer 1D profile

Profiles are an essential part of Modo’s modeling arsenal. Allowing you to quickly produce detailed forms along geometry loops, chamfer profiles brings us one step closer to a feature complete chamfer tool.

Chamfer 1d Profile

 

markup

Markup

Art is communication. Quickly sketch notes or designs directly in the viewport, Whether it be on a single frame or across multiple, markup will help you communicate your ideas clearly.

Unbevel

Every step in a modeling workflow can feel like a commitment. This is particularly true with edge bevels. Unbevel allows you to remove a bevel applied earlier, giving you the flexibility to iterate at late stages of a model or maybe just get home a little earlier.

unbevel modo

 

Element Move Raycast

If an application lacks workflow consistency then the workflow is broken. Element Move Raycast allows you to select polygons while in wireframe mode, exactly as you would in shaded modes, letting artists further leverage muscle memory that is dependent on consistent behavior.

Element Move Raycast

 

Mesh Fusion Embossing

Producing fine, non-destructive details on surfaces has never been easier with the introduction of embossing for Mesh Fusion. Simply sketch curves or leverage curve-based text to project precise embossed designs on your model.

Face Slide

Modo is known for its innovative rapid modeling workflows. This innovation continues with Face Slide by giving you the ability to slide points over faces with easy-to-identify handles, furthering Modo’s modeling dominance.

Face slide modo

 

Falloff World Option

Modo’s falloffs offered artists an easy way to customize their tools. By adding a world option, falloffs have been expanded to allow for consistent behavior across multiple mesh layers, fulfilling artist expectations.

Falloff World Option

 

UV Enhancements

Modo has a tremendous library of tools that can streamline your asset creation workflows. However, when a series of tools are frequently used in a workflow, they should become one tool. Unwrap and Relax, ignore edge selection and eliminating auto activate for relax streamlines common UV workflows letting you produce complex and beautiful maps with ease.

UV Enhancements

 

Scale Groups in Shader Tree

Making scale adjustments to complex materials just got a lot easier. Instead of having to dig through layers of textures and proportionally scaling each individual item, you can now quickly enter a scaling value that is correctly applied across all textures in a group.

mPath Light Pass Enhancements

We all spend enough time every day cleaning up. If you already have LPE’s for lights in your scene and you run the command to create them again, Modo no longer duplicates existing render outputs, eliminating tedious cleanup.

mPath Light enhancements

 

mPath AxF

AxF or Appearance Exchange format is quickly becoming an industry standard for materials in 3D design applications. mPath, the new pathtrace renderer in Modo, now supports AxF allowing users to leverage these high quality material presets in Foundry’s newest cutting-edge renderer.

 

Procedural Vertex Maps

Vertex maps are useful in lots of ways. Modo contains a myriad of vertex map types and ways to use them. We’ve added support for vertex maps in our procedural modeling system, letting artists better exploit these maps procedurally.

Default Mouse Rotation

Modo’s trackball rotation offers a unique navigation style vs. other 3d applications; it can be very powerful for orbiting singular objects but jarring for new users. Trackball rotation is now turned off by default, making it easier for new users to transition. However, we still encourage you to spend a day with trackball.

Mouse Rotation

 

Rename Vortex Deformer to Twist

Language is an important part of software design. We’ve renamed the Vortex Deformer to Twist, making its behavior easier to interpret.

 

Select Partial

Modo’s selection tools are extraordinary and we are constantly evolving in this area. Select Partial provides an incremental improvement to our selection tools, giving artists more control over how components are selected in the viewport.

select partial in Modo