Software > Modo

Foundry has released Modo 13, bringing offline GPU Rendering with AMD’s Radeon Pro Render to the app. Pro Render is not dependent on a particular make of hardware and includes Bilateral and Median denoising algorithms.

MeshFusion sees an update in this release with the addition of Kit Fusing enabling user to be able to define a portion of a mesh to be used for creating boolean operations. According to Foundry this “makes it easier to leverage complex meshes and allows for holes to create the impression of complex negative forms like fan grills with mechanical components that are visible inside a surface”. Direct modelling tools gain Relax Edge and Find Shortest Path Selection features.

Other features include a new Animation Layers feature allows for “non-destructive editing of specific actions […] where each layer can be controlled to override or apply additively in a top-down format”, and a new Array tool allows users to “construct complex relationships that can be leveraged across Modo’s many systems including, rigging, procedural modeling, particles, and more”.

Modo bridge gains Unity support in addition to the existing support for Unreal Engine. Bridge allows users to “transfer Meshes, Instances, Textures, Materials, and Cameras between Modo and Unity with bilateral communication, allowing artists to move items back and forth between either application”.

Finally, the UV toolset has been simplified to reduce time required to generate clean UV maps. New features include a new UV Cut Map option that “allows artists to define sets of selections that are color-coded and displayed on the model in the 3D viewport”. Other improvements to UV tools include UV Split, Wireframe Display, Packing, and the Edge and Vertex Slide.

Modo 13 is available with perpetual licensing for $1799 or a subscription for $599 per year. Visit the Foundry website and read the release notes to find out more about this release.