Fall offs are use to modulate the strength of tools in Modo. This video will help you to see what Fall Offs are available, and how they can be used to speed your modeling work flow. The Fall Off menu is located in the top of the screen, to the right of Action Center and Symmetry. To enable a fall offs, simply click on the menu, and select the desired fall off. We'll look at a few of these that are most common in a typical modeling work flow. Let's start with the Linear fall off. When selecting the Linear falloff, you'll see that some options become visible in the lower left side. But nothing happens in the view port until you turn on a modeling tool.

So let's press the W key to activate the Move tool. And now, in the view port, you can see that, not only are my Modeling Move tool handles visible. But also, there are tools for my falloff. In the right hand view, you can see that at the left side there is a small set of handles. And the tool comes to a point, this indicates a 0% on the Falloff. So where the tool will have no effect, on the right hand side you can see another set of handles. This indicates a 100% where the angle is wide open. If I click and drag on my move handles, you'll see that on the right hand side in my right view, the Modo has moved all the way up, is keeping alignment with my tool handle.

However, on the left hand side it hasn't moved at all. This is that falloff in action. Falloffs are live tools so that they can be edited as you Modo. Now since I had just made this move here I can also move my tool handles. That will change where the beginning and starting points for the falloff are. I can move these anywhere in 3D space and get an idea of how they are going to work without having to turn off my tool and activate it again. In order to see some of the other options for the falloff, I'm going to press the 0 key over on the left hand side to maximize this Tool menu.

You can see that the Linear falloff has a start and an end point. Which have numeric values that I've actually set manually by clicking and dragging on the tool handles themselves. You can also choose to autosize your Linear falloff along the x, y, or z axes, depending on the scale of your model. And then you can choose to reverse the tool, so that the 0 and 100% options are at opposite sides of each other. You can choose symmetry, so that at the start or at the end of your falloff, at the 0% or at the 100%. The tool will be mirrored, so you can see with symmetric set to end, the tool increases to 100% strength and then decreases back down and has symmetrical handles.

Simply by moving one of the handles this symmetry will stay in place. In addition to changing the position and the symmetry of your handles, you can also choose how the interpolation happens. By default, this shape preset is set to Linear. Which means that it is going to go directly from 0 to 100%. By choosing either Ease In, Ease out or Smooth. You can change the way that that interpolation happens.

If more control is needed, you can choose a custom shape preset. And then control the easing on either the in or the out. So at the 0 or at the 100% based off of negative 1, up through positive 1 values. And this will give you exact control over how the tool falloff happens. I'm going to press Q to drop my tool and then undo until I get back to a flat polygon. Let's look at some of the other falloffs that are available. The cylinder falloff is centered in this 3D viewport, and acts as a cylinder projected through 3D space.

At the moment, this is projected down the z axis, and there isn't any depth to gain from this. So if we project down the y axis, you'll see, now a circle appears here in the top view. And this circle represents the Cylinder falloff. So at the center of the cylinder is 100% value, and at the outer edge is 0%. I can click and drag with my Move tool and you can see the effect of the falloff. Just like the other Linear falloff, I can click and drag on these handles to change the orientation, the position and the scale of my falloff, while the tool is active.

Since a cylinder falloff is based off of a point in space, and then falling off outwards, there's no option for symmetry or reversing, but there is control over the shape preset. Linear, ease in, ease out, smooth, or custom. These will give you a good falloff based on the center of space. Once again, I'm going to press Q to drop my tool and undo back to a flat plane. The Radial falloff is much like the cylinder falloff, but it exists as a bubble in 3D space.

Without doing anything else on this flat plane, if I click and drag, the effect is going to be very similar to my Cylinder falloff. ANd that's because the Radial falloff currently has no y value, so no height. By clicking and dragging on the green box, I can create a bit of a bubble in 3D space. This bubble at the center will be 100% and at the edges will be a 0% falloff. So by changing, not only the position of my handles for the outside edge of the tool might see a change.

But also if I move the falloff up or down, I'll see the changes to how the tool is active on the surface. This radial falloff is great for working in 3D space, where a particular area of a model needs to be edited. But, it isn't along one flat surface. Once again I'm going to press Q to drop my tool and escape back to a flat plane. The Noise falloff is also very useful as this creates a bit of a randomized falloff. If I simply click and drag my Move tool with this active, you can see that in 3D space I have high and low values where the percentage is varying.

The only control that I have over the Noise falloff is the scale, by choosing smaller scales, the noise becomes more turbulent and by choosing higher scales, it becomes more smooth. But still keeps that variation accross the surface of the object. Next we will look at the Path Based falloff. This falloff will allow you to create a curve in 3D space and then falloff based off of the position of that curve. By clicking at different points on the surface, I create a curve.

These points can be moved around while the tool is active. And then this path has a falloff side. So the distance from the path that the fall off occurs at default it's set to one meter. Which is very big for the scale of this object. . So I'm going to drag this all the way down to about 100 millimeters. And then I'll use my Move tool to move this up. You can see that the falloff is following this curve. And the size is how far away from the curve the falloff occurs. Let's drop the tool and undo back to flat plane one more time.

Selection and soft selection are two relatively similar falloff styles that affects specific polygonal selections. So I'm going to click on Polygons, so that I can select polygons. And, click and drag to create a small selection of geometry in the middle of my plane. To make it a little bit bigger. So, it doesn't matter that the selection is not even, this will help illustrate the shape of the falloff.

So let's go to a selection based falloff. And press W again to turn on my Move tool. And click and drag up. You can see that the outer edge of the selection is not being moved at all. But the center of it is being moved upwards. The strength of this falloff is the number of steps. And this is how many vertices are included as the falloff goes 0% to 100%. So, at two steps, it takes two vertices to get all the way up to 100. If I click it down to one you can see that it peaks up closer to my handles and then if I increase beyond two it's pretty much going to flatten out the surface since I don't have that many polygons selected.

Once again like the other falloffs I can choose linear Ease in, Ease out for a smooth shape preset. So once again back up to a flat plain and I'm going to leave selection or you can make another selection if you like. And the last One that we'll look at here, is the Soft Selection. This works much like the Selection falloff, but the fall off happens outside of the actual selection. So you can see that this superimposed grid that's lining up with my edges, is going from the selection outwards and is tapering from the orange color of the selection, out to black, and then eventually disappearing.

By click and drag you can see that my entire selection is being moved to the 100%, but that the falloff is happening outside of this selection. The falloff radius controls the distance that this falloff happens. And if you have multiple pieces of your object, in similar space. The use connectivity option will ensure that your only having the falloff active on the object that you currently have selected. Falloffs are one of the great tools that make Modo a fantastic modelling in 3D application. Understanding them and using them will allow you to work more efficiently.