The end of January...

...marks my first month with MODO. What a momentous occasion, right? In that time I've made a whole model and unwrapped and textured it.

100% Procedural /s

That went... well it was overall pretty challenging tbh. But let's talk about the struggle in a bit.

But first, the easier part: unwrapping and macros!

Feels like I'm understanding more about getting faster in MODO. Specifically I'm running with macros in my crew now. So I know what macros are in a general sense and have used them to automate repetitive tasks in other programs, but MODO makes these a lot more user friendly to setup. Basically, you record macros the exact same way you record "Actions" in Photoshop. Then you can map them to menus or hotkeys. And since mapping to new menus looks kind of complicated (meaning it doesn't look as easy as Maya or even Max where you can drag and drop) I went the hotkey route.

I wax on about macros because my first reaction to unwrapping started at "WOW this is slow" and ended at "Gotta go fast". All because of a few macros. My favorite so far is a macro that flattens UV shells based on hard edges, relaxes, orients shells, then packs em. 

Overall, I don't think I'm any faster unwrapping than using say, Maya. But probably quite a bit faster than Max.

Awesome UV features include:

• Rectangle - makes an all quad UV shell rectangular! Works on multiple shells! Invaluable for poly loops.
• Orient Pieces - automatically rotates shells to lay flat on a perfectly horizontal or vertical edge. I run this on many shells at once!
• Align UV by Edge - Aligns the shell to the U or V axis using the selected edge. Like Max's but works consistently!

Other stuff to explore:

• How does one handle stacking UV shells in MODO?
• Can I get better packs? Max wins here as far as auto packs go

The Struggle

The struggle is real. 

If unwrapping, the part every artist wants to skip was easy, what was hard?

Surprisingly... baking! I struggled so hard to bake this prop and I got stressed about it.

I studied a ton of tutorials and pored over documentation concentrating on how baking in MODO is intended to work. In reality, I could never get an acceptable bake out of MODO particularly using the Bake Wizard particularly. Each time I tried I ended up with bakes so bad, you'd think me a'learning 3D all over again like a young pup. It was demoralizing. It took so many tries to begin to understand what could be wrong and the particular peculiarities of this pipeline in MODO. I still very much don't understand a lot of the behind-the-scenes things going on with this process.

My troubles came mostly from trying to bake the rounded edge shader. Easy modeling sure, but boy did I lose all that time to baking! After around 50 bakes i finally got something not horrible and I still threw it out. It's worth mentioning that I got a very good bake on a simpler test object so there was something that I didn't understand going on with my model. It was very frustrating! But frustration is part of learning. Next time, we do it twice as good and twice as fast, promise.

So what I actually ended up doing was baking in my old pal  ̶A̶l̶l̶e̶g̶o̶r̶i̶t̶h̶m̶i̶c̶  Adobe Substance Painter. (That was some big news, huh) This meant I had to do some real high poly work in MODO and Zbrush. Why Zbrush? I used Zbrush for the motor to create bevels and welds for the small doodads that I previously clipped together hoping the rounded edge shader would do that work for me. I could have learned some Mesh Fusion for this, but I've got another MODO project on the horizon for that... 

I also ended up texturing in Substance Painter because it's a JOY. 

Just so you know, the actual tutorial covered modeling, simple materials, and rendering. All of this unwrapping and texturing is extra credit

What's Next?

I didn't do everything I wanted to do in MODO. And while staying in one package is never a goal for me as an artist, I'm still eager to learn more about the tools I skipped over. I could walk away right now knowing I can make some cool geo in MODO fast, unwrap it fast, and take it into Painter to texture. This is precisely my pipeline no matter what I use to make the geo.

But then I'd miss out!

Also there's a good bit of fundamental MODO features that I interact with but don't understand at all. The List panel and Channels panel are probably chief among these.

So what's next for me is making another prop with a focus on:

• Mesh Fusion
• Shader Tree learning
• Rendering inside MODO
• Making a Maya style marking menu
• Finding solutions to pain points from the previous project (mostly baking)
• Customization: stage one
• Understanding Lists and Channels

I might end up following another of Vaughn Ling's sweet tuts, since I bought all/most of them. hint: they're gooooood

- Pittskrieg

It's a new year...

And I'd like to add a brand spanking new skill. 

So I decided to learn the great beast MODO in my spare time to have the opportunity to take advantage of that software's awesome (and exclusive) tools. Tools like the very tasty looking Mesh Fusion. MMMMM

Also, I really like learning things. I'm kind of nutty that way. I think I miss academia... but this is way easier on my bank account than the great American loan.

Learning the interface for MODO has been challenging. I'm not super far in, and there are tons of things I don't understand yet so that's fun. So far, my largest hurdle has been getting used to the idea of pressing a key to commit translations. (Hint: IT'S WEIRD)

Since I didn't understand something so fundamental to working in 3D in this program, I had to do some fancy googling

Resources

To halp me on my journey, I've found a number of great resources free and paid:

Pixel Fondue's short and sweet videos have helped expose me to a number of useful features nearly every time I google a MODO question.

The Foundry has a great set of videos going over many key modeling tools. In particular I like that they had videos specifically for users coming from different DCC apps like 3DS Max and Maya. I'm coming from Max mostly.

The Modo User Guide has also proven very useful in finding official documentation for different tools.

I most certainly did not.

Work in Progress

On the paid side, I ended up buying most of Vaughan Ling's tuts to take the MODO beginner to the MODO super genius. He also has a similar set for Blender. And tbh, I was torn between learning MODO now or Blender. I've dabbled in Blender and its latest version looks fantastic, but MODO's tools won me over. Anyway, I can always learn Blender in the future. 

The first tutorial I did covers creating a simple prop in the form of the iconic Braun HL70 fan, famously seen in the original Blade Runner. The product was designed by noted industrial designers Reinhold Weiss and Juergen Greubel, icons of functionalist design and clear visual inspirations for one of my favorite eras of science fiction in the 80s. You can find their work on display in places like the MoMA. 

In following the tutorial, I decided to take it a step further and add a few extra details and model a motor for extra practice. (Full disclosure: I don't know what the inside of this fan actually looks like so... ART!) Overall, I'm not displeased with the results. The casing took me two full days of learning to model in MODO from the ground up. The motor took me about an hour or two (with iteration and experimentation) so I definitely feel like I'm at least getting comfortable with the tools.

Things I really like include:

• Bevel - I really like beveling in MODO. Bevel here is used for chamfers, insets, extrusions, and more. Also bevels can have Max loft-like profiles built in, creating complex chamfers in seconds.
• Work Plane - built in to MODO. If you've never used a work plane, check them out! (I use a script to have one in Max)
• Radial array - very easy and very responsive. You can adjust the proportions of the circle, number of objects, and more mid-flight 
• Speed - Modo is a lot more responsive than Max and Maya so far
• MODO is fun to say MOW-DOUGH
• Selection tools - Where to begin? Selections in MODO are a dream come true. I love that paint selection, point selection, and lasso selection are all readily available without having to switch between selection modes. I also like that you can right-click to lasso while ignoring backfaces and middle click to lasso without ignoring backfaces. No toggle necessary. Selection tools like this are probably a huge reason I feel fast even though I'm still a MODO baby

What's Next

I couldn't live with myself if I didn't unwrap and texture this guy. There's a special place in hell for people like that. Unfortunately, since the tutorial I've been following is geared toward concept artists and visual designers, unwrapping isn't covered there. Luckily, I've been looking for resources and asking lots of questions of fellow artists and I might have some good answers shortly.

I'd also like to look more into customizing MODO which is something I have so far deliberately held off of to keep compatibility with tutorials. However, I definitely have some ideas for what I'd like to do to speed things up. A lot of MODO's default keys are spread across the keyboard, requiring me to remove my hand from the mouse. Screw that. Also I've been recommended a sweet video that shows how to set up Maya-style marker menus so I want to get that going. I did this in Max and it's so good.

If all goes well I've been thinking about dropping this in the scene I've been working on. But that's a story for another time.

- Pittskrieg