Free Update Provides UV Editing Innovations, Faster Rendering Speed and New DXF Plug-in
“We recently finished evaluating modo 203 and are frankly impressed,” said Seneca Menard, 3D artist at id Software. “Not only are the new UV tools hugely welcomed, we are delighted with the even quicker rendering speed. It’s a sweet update to one of our favorite tools and kudos to Luxology for making it free to modo users.”
New and improved features in modo 203
modo 203 includes technology and user interface additions that combine to make the rapid development of high-quality UVs even easier. The UV unwrap tool has been improved so that UVs are laid out by the software with less angular and proportional distortion as compared to the geometric polygon volume. To help modo users interactively relax the UV data, the UV pinning function has been improved. The seal hole option in UV unwrap has also been overhauled for more reliability on enclosed spaces in the mesh, such as eye sockets. UV editing is also improved through the addition of a move and sew option ‘ an enhancement to the previous sew capability that makes the joining and scaling of discontinuous UVs a one-step operation. Copying and pasting a UV between polygons is now facilitated in modo, and a new UV orient capability makes it very easy to have all UVs perfectly lined up horizontally or vertically.
The modo renderer – already one of the industry’s fastest renderers for global illumination – gets two additional speed injections in modo 203. The fundamental operation of ray tracing has been boosted as much as 1.4 times in tests conducted by Luxology and even greater speed has been reported by beta testers. In addition to faster production rendering, ambient occlusion and full light “baking” operations (often employed to further accelerate rendering in game development and many other fields) also benefit from the ray-tracing speed improvement. Irradiance caching has been optimized, further cranking up global illumination performance on large resolution renderings.
modo 203 also features a new DXF plug-in that reads and writes ASCII DXF files from inside modo. Architects and designers can now use modo to import a range of 2D and 3D entities from DXF files; including: polymesh, arcs, circles, lines, points, polylines and more. Layers in the incoming DXF files are automatically created as corresponding layers in the modo scene to preserve file organization. On export from modo, the new translator converts modo triangles and quads into a polymesh, with vertex connectivity maintained. This further extends modo’s pipeline integration capabilities, allowing it to be used in partnership with many design software tools that also support DXF.
About modo
modo is an award-winning 3D modeling, painting and rendering software designed to accelerate the creation of world-class models, associated color and normal maps, and ultra high-quality renderings. modo’s modern workflow and advanced toolset deliver increased productivity and performance for 3D artists working in a variety of disciplines. modo’s innovative and powerful artist-friendly toolset offers one of the fastest paths to creating great games content and is a recipient of the renowned Game Developer Front Line Award.
Pricing and Availability
modo ships on a single disc supporting both Mac OSX and Windows, and sells for a suggested retail price of USD $895. Current modo 202 users receive the modo 203 update as an electronic download free of charge. A free 30-day full-function evaluation version of modo 203 is also available for immediate download from modo3d.com. The modo 203 evaluation version includes a starter pack of sample files and an interactive exploration guide that provides an artful introduction to modo’s most popular tools. Luxology also offers a wide array of modo training videos and other educational materials designed to enhance the modo learning process for novice and experienced users.
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