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Foundry's Modo has received a major update that comes in collaboration with OTOY's OctaneRender and brings deep architectural changes increasing performance across modeling tools, animation playback, and rig interaction.
It's been a whole year since Foundry released the last version and announced the change in their strategy to the development of Modo, the 3D modeling and rendering software. Among the developers' restructuring and marketing plans, they announced the switch to one major release a year and finally, Modo 17 is out.
Modo 17, called the "beginning of a new Modo", is said to cater to the needs of all kinds of artists and features OTOY's OctaneRender, upgraded modeling tools, improved performance for Apple Silicon, and many more. Foundry highlights that this is the largest architectural change Modo has ever seen.
Image Credit: Foundry, Modo
A number of significant accelerations to 10 of Modo's modeling tools and MeshOps were made. Any of the operations that the tools like Edge Slice, Polygon Extrude, Loop Slice, and others do which does not create geometry, meaning moving position, now follows a quicker "incremental code path". In other words, modeling has become much faster.
Image Credit: Foundry, Modo
Another big change is the improvement in the interactivity of animation playback and rig interaction. The drawing code path for OpenGL viewports has been completely rewritten to accommodate using "view objects" as the drawing options. This means that the buffers for the drawing are generated in background threads and then provided to the OpenGL draw calls when ready. Therefore the generation of the parts needed for drawing is now detached from the main thread.
The developers note, that Modo can leverage two threads at once, but there are plans for future additions allowing for multiple background threads.
Image Credit: Foundry, Modo
Modo 17 has also introduced a natively compiled build of Modo for use on Apple Silicon-based Macs, resulting in up to "50% speed improvements when compared to emulating the X86 version of Modo for Macs".
However, some new features are unavailable in Modo 17 due to third-party technology not being compatible with Mac ARM. The Pose Tool and Retargeting are known not to work in the Native ARM version and the users are advised to go with the X86 emulated version of Modo 17.
Another major change is a collaboration with OTOY, meaning the Prime edition of the OctaneRender integration plugin is now bundled with the software. Among its many advantages, OTOY also enables artists to upload their scenes to its GPU render farm for a more streamlined experience.
As for Mac users, OctaneRender comes with the Apple Silicon ARM version but isn't supported on the Intel version of Modo on macOS.
Image Credit: Foundry, Modo
In addition to new features, some improvements and enhancements were brought to existing tools such as Advanced Viewport display mode. Now, users can toggle textures on or off, without the need to go into the Shader Tree.
The Mesh Cleanup system now includes Fix Gaps, meaning there's no longer any need to perform these operations manually.
You can find the full list of new features on the Modo official site and don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.