MODO: Features and Additional Toolkits

The Career

Professionally, I have been with Wooga for almost 3 years now, where we use MODO to create offline-rendered backgrounds and assets for story-driven mobile games.

First impressions of MODO

I made the switch from Maya to MODO almost 10 years ago, when I started helping out in an indie company of some friends because it was the software they were using. At first, it felt a bit clunky, to be honest with MODO’s camera, the workplane that keeps flipping about and having to press space all the time. But then quickly, all the MODO things started to make sense, and I especially appreciated how MODO handles polygons and meshes and how easy it is to copy, past, merge and split them.

Using MODO for In-Game Meshes Production

Foundry has done a lot of work in recent versions to cater to game-asset creation. Since my professional work mostly involves offline rendering, I cannot speak about how well it shapes up in a real production environment.

I have always been fond of the possibilities that MODO offers in texture baking. With the way it is implemented you can bake anything that you could render into a texture, based on UVs of one or more meshes, too. Even project from high poly to a low poly mesh. That means you can bake out procedurally textured materials, lighting or the whole suite of maps that you usually want to bake, based on mid poly meshes that are using the rounded-edge shader instead of needing to create subdivision surface meshes. All of these bake settings can be stored in Bake Items to streamline the process and reduce the possibility of human error when iterating.

The handling of smoothing groups and hard edges and using area-weighted normals has been greatly improved, too. Even transferring custom normals, if you are creating foliage, for example, is super easy, too.

Another small function Modo has had for a long time, but not many people seem to know about, is the option to align your scene with an item. This means that if you have moved and rotated a prop into position on a character using item transforms, you can with one click toggle this item to be the origin of the scene, and you can continue working on it as if it has not been moved or rotated at all.

About the Farfarer’s Vertex Normal Toolkit

Initially, MODO did not have any dedicated handling of soft and hard edges or smoothing groups and instead only used a smoothing angle on the material. Farfarer (James O'Hare) created his Vertex Toolkit to solve this issue and give game artists more control over the smoothing on their low poly meshes. By now this functionality has been integrated into MODO properly, and you can set hard edges, use smoothing groups and even apply area-weighted normals natively. Another noteworthy add-on developer is William Vaughan, who created the MOP Boolean Toolkit that greatly improves your flexibility when using the mid-poly and rounded-edge-shader approach by keeping boolean meshes live and non-destructive.

But most of all, I actually enjoy how easy it is in MODO to record Macros, which are like Actions in Photoshop and integrate small scripts from the community. With the help of those and easy creation of custom shortcuts and customization of UI, including the creation of pop-ups like pie menus, artists have the ability to shape and streamline how they interact with MODO to work fluently in the way they enjoy.

Favorite Tools in MODO

My favorite tools in MODO are probably the basics: Move, Rotate, and Scale. Using those together with MODO’s Workplane and Action Centers it gives you a ton of flexibility in manipulating vertices to create and iterate on your desired shapes. It is the simple things like predictably moving in two dimensions on the Workplane or placing the Scale tool wherever I want on screen to scale from that point. And I could give many more examples like these where MODO does not get in your way and you can just create freely.

Advice for Beginners

Most importantly, I would urge you to not disable MODO’s standard camera and opt for the traditional one instead. As - while it might feel weird and uncontrollable, at first - it gives you so much flexibility in quickly selecting what you want, inspecting your mesh from angles and working in screen space to tweak shapes in all kinds of directions.

Overall I think that in MODO, like in any modeling software, especially if you are new to 3D, it is a good idea to first stick to the basics of the program and start to layer more customization and scripts on top of that foundation that make sense for your workflow and what type of work you are creating.

A great resource for MODO tutorials and especially smaller tips and tricks is Pixel Fondue and their Youtube channel.

Tor “snefer” Frick is showing in his Twitch streams and Youtube videos one example of a quick and fluent Modo workflow.

Henning Sanden has a nice guide to how he improved his Modo workflow on his website.

Bastian Pastoors, 3D Artist 

Interview conducted by Ellie Harisova