I’m blown away by the 501 vids. I’d like to buy Modo to use a render pipeline for XSI.
Is anyone currently using it to render animations from other software? I’d guess MDD would be used in most cases. What would the general workflow be to allow for changes, etc?
Am not sure about animation, has always been the main weak spot in modo, but having used the product for several years, th upgrades are always major improvements. If you do any modeling or sculpting, you’ll love modo.
I love XSI’s modeling capabilities, but I’d guess that if I wanted to use the workflow I mentioned, it would be better to model in Modo. Then if I wanted to use SubPixel displacement or sculpting, I could keep everything right here in Modo, and export base models to be rigged and/or animated in XSI. If any changes are made to the geometry, it would be done in modo, then a new object could be exported to softimage to update in the animation scene.
Does that sound right?
I used it for the first time on a recent project strictly as a renderer(Max is my main app) Let me just say that the preview renderer is amazing.(used 401) Being able to view GI lit SSS shader with displacement map in real-time is an absolute dream come true!! The endless hours of tweak>rendertest>tweak>rendertest in MR/Vray is a thing of the past with the preview renderer and the many improvements apparent in 501 make it a very interesting renderer indeed.
No idea about animation, although Collada is strongly supported so maybe you might be in luck…
I bought 501 yesterday and used it a little last night. The renderer is pretty spectacular. One of the best things was how easy it was to set up other machines on the network to render buckets.
I just bought it and am downloading now. I didn’t see anything on Luxology about any new distributed rendering. Can you shed some light on that? I’d love to set up a simple net solution.
Thanks!
Alec
It’s really easy. It works like satellite rendering in Mental Ray, except no BS to deal with. You just install Modo on all of the network machines. A license isn’t needed, it will run in “slave mode” and wait for the main computer to feed it a scene. You have to set up a common network directory, and set some things in the Modo preferences. It works great.
I do.
my observations. mdd files work great. fbx from soft dont work quite well. but the only soild fbx test (camera’s null’s etc.) was from crosswalk 4xx to modo 401 sp1.
x-walk 5 onwards all downhill for me. works on somedays others are just blue.
but maybe its my OS / Hardware drivers etc… etc…
hope that helps.
Interesting topic guys, thanks for the info. I think the vast majority of people working with Modo use if for modelling and rendering stills. Despite the growing support for the .Collada format, which will be very useful in the future. I personally wouldn’t have thought using Modo for rendering animations would be the best option at the moment, due to the fact that animation has always been Modo’s weakest area! Although I am positive this will soon change though.
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