LONDON — The Foundry (thefoundry.co.uk) has launched Modo 10.2, the latest version of its professional modeling and animation software. The new release offers powerful updates for procedural modeling, retopology, rendering and more.
Modo 10.2 is the final release in the Modo 10 Series, The Foundry’s first multi-part offering that accelerated the speed at which users receive major updates. Geared for professionals and beginners alike, the Modo 10 series has provided new features and improvements for the games, VR and product design markets since its launch in March, including the popular procedural modeling toolset.
MeshFusion has been completely revamped in Version 10.2, making it easier to cut, combine and intersect geometry. Guided by a new schematic-free workflow, Modo’s advanced Boolean toolset will now automatically launch and reorder a model’s underlying tree structure whenever an edit is made. Along with cleaner outputs and enhanced viewport visibility, MeshFusion is more user friendly than before.
"The closer we get to freeform creativity, the more our users win, no matter what industry they are in," says Derek Cicero, head of industrial design at The Foundry. “Modo 10.2 has been designed with artists in mind. It’s fast, powerful and easy to use, everything an artist needs to produce something special."
Creating quad meshes at any density is now automatic, removing the need for manual cleaning. The meshes will not only follow the curvature of an input surface, but can be controlled by weight maps and sketched guide curves, increasing artistic input whenever they want to creatively refine assets.
Procedural modeling has been enhanced. Users now have the ability to package, share and reuse assembly aliases, turning what can often be a complex set of mesh operations into a single item that users can share as presets. Slicing, drilling, cloning and duplicating tools have also been added/updated, bringing more production standards into the procedural modeling workflow.
Deformations and mesh operations can now be cached and held in memory, so artists working on complex animations can scrub the timeline significantly faster.
The Preview Renderer and Advanced Viewport have received significant performance improvements, while the new ability to use arbitrary meshes as light sources offers a new lighting workflow that can easily represent difficult shapes such as filament bulbs.
Modo 10.2 is now available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, and is a free update for Modo 10 Series customers. New users can purchase an individual license for $1,799 or upgrade from a previous edition for $499.