Foundry has revealed Modo 12, the first of 3 releases planned in the 12 series.
Meshpaint improvements in Modo 12.0
Mesh Paint Refinements
Modo’s Mesh Paint tool has been brought up-to-date and enhanced, allowing you to quickly bash out models and environments faster than ever before. With the ability to now paint random presets, you can utilize asset libraries in new and exciting ways, and the new array paint modes give you greater control when painting more ordered collections of objects.
Mesh Fusion Surface Strips in Modo 12.0
MeshFusion Surface Strips
MeshFusion is significantly enhanced with Surface Strips, an innovative new feature that works by allowing the creation of strip geometry or topology that lies flush on any Fusion Item surface. This provides a wide range of opportunities for Post-Fusion modeling with either Procedural operations or direct modeling of the Fusion Output Mesh. The most obvious examples are channels and ridges along arbitrary paths — but the range of applications is much much wider, allowing artists to explore iterations more creatively than ever before.
Modelling and Design Enhancements
Modeling and Design Creation Enhancements
The Jitter tool has new options to randomize the position, scale and rotation of connected geometry within a single Item. It also works with connected selections, allowing you to quickly add subtle realism in situations where previously it would have been difficult. It’s now possible to model even faster in a single 3D viewport by moving objects towards you and away from you without having to interact directly with any transform handles. And a new tool handle has been added to the Vertex Slide tool, giving you greater control when tweaking the position of vertices in a mesh.
Triangulate MeshOp
New Procedural Mesh Operations
A Triangulate MeshOp has been added, which lets you export triangulated models in a non- destructive manner. The Merge Mesh operator can now read replicator items as geometry inputs, allowing replicated geometry to be manipulated using procedural modeling tools, and providing an easy way to convert a replicator item into a single mesh item for export. It’s now possible to modulate the shape of an Item Falloff via the Mini Graph Editor, allowing for a much wider array of falloff effects when rigging or procedural modeling. The new Falloff Operator lets you drive Mesh Operation Falloffs via a range of a scene and geometric parameters.
Cloud Assets and Foundry Share
Cloud Assets and Foundry Share Site
Creating, sharing and downloading preset assets has been improved. Cloud Assets can now be dragged and dropped into the item tree or directly into the Modo viewport. Just want to download the assets and not apply them to your scene? Use the new download badge that appears in the upper left of the preset thumbnail. The process of preset creation has also been significantly streamlined. It’s now possible to create any preset type by simply dragging from it’s location in the UI into any preset browser.
Refinements of UV tools and Workflows in Modo 12.0
UV Tools and Workflow Refinements
Modo’s fast and nimble workflows continue to be refined, with UI optimization and new toolbar menu options making it easier to manage 3rd party Modo Add-ons. The Modo Modes toolbar has been reorganized for more consistency, with a number of modes now having improved workflows, vastly reducing the number of clicks involved in a standard Modo modeling session, while the UV viewport has new buttons to give easy access to a range of common display options. The Fit UVs command has new Gaps options to set border padding. Also, it’s now easier to align multiple UV selections in one go.
Hatchet collection in Modo 12.0
The Hatchet Collection
Modo 12.0 comes with a selection of python scripts from the popular Hatchet Collection, enhancing core functionality in Modo and making asset creation even more efficient. There’s a wide variety of tools to convert curve types, offset curves, select random, and much more.
Foundry
You can learn more about the latest version here.