modo is a new 3d modeling, painting, texturing and rendering application from luxology. It’s brilliant.
modo has many features and is an extremely advanced and capable modeler, 3d painting and rendering package. For us the most useful feature of modo is the item preview. For example, when designing/treating/manipulating a logo in 3d space, you would typically have to do a test render to see how the look was progressing.
A 3d scene usually takes a fair amount of time to render – sometimes minutes or hours. But objects are never textured and lit the way you would like the first time around – so these settings are changed a little and then another render is generated. This process is done over and over until the final image is right. The amount of time taken for this continual tweaking and re-rendering of a scene can be longer than it took for the original model to be drawn.
modo has the unique (ie. in-built and not a third-party plugin) ability among 3d applications – a real-time preview window. Any change to lighting, shape or textures, however minor, is immediately reflected in this preview window, turning the tweaking process from a real chore to almost a joy to go through. “What if I move that light over there? Mmm, no. What about there? Ok that looks good.” Seconds is all it takes to get feedback.
… sporting some improved UV tools, numerous bug improvements and DXF import/export.
