Okay for all of you who haven’t seen it. especially Solid Works users. I just want to say Modo from luxology is pretty sweet. With an awesome price tag of under a $1000.00
Sub-D modeling
Animation
Rendering
Painting
And with a direct import for SW parts and assemblies. And I have to say the learning curve along with the users sharing their expertise makes it pretty easy to get up to speed quick.
I do renderings in SW / Alias design / Alias show case and I have to say this is my new favorite and I have just added it to my tool box.
I would recommend if you are looking for a alternative to what you are currently using to download and try the full 30 day eval! in the last 30 days I have done 2 projects using the software which i cant show because of confidentiality of course, but the end results were great with a increase output result.
Attached is my image from one of their beginning trainings video’s basically took 20 minutes from start to finish.
Cool, when SW came out with its new renderer I hunted down where they got it from and found Modo, which did look interesting. We currently only have SW (as our company started out as more of an engineering firm for product design) and have been thinking about getting Rhino for some quick concept modeling. I see that you don’t have Rhino, but do you (or anyone else) have a sense of how this compares (especially for banging out quick concepts)?
For the projects you did, was this a total replacement of Alias’ role? Or was there anything you found that you just couldn’t do? Also, did you have to export to SW, and if so how did that go?
Modo is a sweet tool, especially for rendering. The SLIK (studio lighting kit) and PAD (product material presets) are an awesome combo, they let you assign real world materials (only product I’ve ever seen that flat out calls shaders MT11010) and use real world lighting rigs and not abstract floating objects. It gets very very sweet results though frankly I haven’t found the time to incorporate it into my workflow. The renderer is very fast especially when compared to some of the other photorealistic renderers out there.
It’s useful for concept stuff if you aren’t being held responsible for any final geometry creation, but you’ll still need a proper NURBS/Solid tool if you want to build stuff for production.
I have Alias / Pro e / SW here and at this time Im not using modo for form development, but I am looking into that for quick from development were I don’t have tight engineering constraints. For the projects I did I was looking for a way to streamline the transfer process of data into a rendering package. Photoview 360 in SW is nice if you r model is in SW but it is limited to how far you can take the render and tweak your shaders. Alias is a great rendering package but I find it can bothersome importing SW models into. Especially large engineering assemblies which on of the projects was. I also find that it is slow to render in comparison to other render packages… but it was never realy meant to compete with Maya or others.
In Modo 32 bit there is a direct open format for SW and although not perfect i.e. you need to learn how to deal with instances / mirrors / and patterns everything was pretty nice. As for Rhino it is very much like Alias were in you are either building using curves or editing surface cv’s were Modo is like Maya and you use Sub’d or ply modeling and from what I can see from a stand point of banging out concepts Sub D is way faster. For example that coffee mug can take less then 2.5 minutes ( and yes i did time myself)
I tell you the more i use it the more i love it. Here is a quick rendering with 3 simple lights set. Probably took less then 45 minutes to set up and that was with a learning curve.
I bought modo about a year ago and I really like it. Most of my modeling is done in SW 2010 (although I’m really intrigued by sub d modeling and fooling around with it a little), and I use modo primarily for rendering. I just upgraded to 501 and there are some really nice improvements that make it worthwhile.
There is a great tutorial on the Luxology (makers of Modo) website:
The tutorial is by an Industrial Designer and shows how Modo can be used as a visualization tool. The modelling part of the software is really not usefully as a production tool, but can fit in a designers pre-production process real nicely.
If you are looking for a tool that makes you more marketable as a ID guy in product design then I would look at learning to model in Rhino or SW. I am looking at Modo modeling for very early upfront form development and variation, but i would never hand the models off for down stream use. The visualization side and animation has now become a solid tool within my development process and presentation material.
1st of all let me tell you something When I read you post topic first I though you are in love with… anyways as you have talked about modo here yeah modo is a perfect tool for getting animation, rending, painting etc. on designs . I’ve used it some time ago and I like it the way it is more user friendly and easy to use. Thank for the post.
