What's New in the Modo 10.0 Series

Modo 10.0 has several new features and feature enhancements in addition to bug fixes. This page documents the new features and links to the appropriate page of the online help so you can get the information you need to start working with the new features right away. To read about bug fixes and feature enhancements, navigate to a specific release.

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UI

Game Tools Layout

This new layout focuses on game-related tools and features. Its flexible, easily customizable structure gives you quick access to tools needed for vertex normal editing, texture baking, and exporting to game engines, in addition to the standard modeling tools. For detailed information about the Game Tools layout, see Game Layout.

1st Person Navigation

You can now use 1st person navigation to move through 3D space using a set of keyboard shortcuts, giving you a convenient way to explore level designs. For more information, see Game Navigation.

Redirected Properties

The properties form for one item now shows channels from an unselected but connected item. Selecting a light in the Item List or Shader Tree now shows the light color channel, even if the light material is not selected. Selecting a texture layer in the Shader Tree displays its projection settings without selecting the Texture Locator.

GL

Advanced Viewport Enhancements

New rendering features have been added to the Advanced Viewport to allow for a more photo-realistic look, assisting development for real-time engines in Modo. These features can be configured in the Advanced Options for the 3D (OpenGL) Viewport.

Rendering

PBR Material

Two new material types have been added to Modo, closely matching the materials in Unity and Unreal Engine. They use the same material channels, and behave similarly both in Modo's Advanced viewport, and in rendering.

Modo also includes Unreal Engine 4 and Unity 5 base shaders, providing a WYSIWYG representation of content that matches the runtime environment. For more information on the new materials, see the Unity Material and Unreal Material topics.

File I/O

Unreal Material Importer

A new plugin for Unreal Engine 4 has been created, which reads an .xml file exported from Modo containing material information necessary to match the shader parameters set in Modo with those in Unreal Engine 4. This greatly improves the translation process between the two products, and saves artists time that used to be spent redoing work and was error prone. For details on using the plugin, see Modo Material Importer for Unreal Engine.

Unity Material Importer

A new plugin for Unity 5 has been created, which reads an .xml file exported from Modo containing material information necessary to match the shader parameters set in Modo with those in Unity 5. This greatly improves the translation process between the two products, and saves artists time that used to be spent redoing work and was error-prone. For details on using the plugin, see Modo Material Importer for Unity.

FBX Animation Import

The FBX Import dialog now has a Merge with existing items option. When enabled, you can load animation data from the FBX file onto any matching (by name) items in your scene.

There is also a new Import from FBX option in the Actions popover form, which allows you to load actions from FBX. For more information, see FBX Import.

FBX Improvements

The new FBX 2015 plugin allows you to export UV sets alphabetically. Default color correction is now applied to all loaded clips from non-LXO formats. When loading FBX files, vector maps, normals, and so on, are auto-set to linear color correction.

Mesh Export to Game Engines Without Triangulation

We implemented an option to force triangulation on FBX export, making sure it matches Modo's internal triangulation for GL/Render. For information on exporting game assets, see Game Asset Exporter.

DDS Format Support

A new plug-in has been added which allows to import a range of common DDS image formats. For more information, see Bitmap Image Formats.

Optimized Export to Game Engines

The Game Tools layout gives you access to the Export tab, where you can export content to game engines with ready-made presets for Unreal and Unity. You can also create custom presets to target additional engines. For more details on exporting game assets, see Game Asset Exporter.

PBR Material Export to Game Engines

You can export Unreal and Unity materials in an .xml format, alongside FBX. Used with our new custom Unreal and Unity plugins, it allows moving PBR materials easily from Modo to game engines. For more information, see .

Thickness Type for Occlusion Texture

Modo has a new occlusion type: Thickness. This allows you to bake out thickness and tweak its parameters, compared to the thickness layer. For more information, see Occlusion.

Relative Paths

In the Images tab, if the image you use is stored somewhere relative to the scene file or the current project, the display of the path is truncated. For more information, see the Images/Clips List.

Modeling

Vertex Tools

The Game Tools layout houses a series of commands for setting up vertex normals. Individual edges can be set as hard or soft, which constructs a vertex normal map on the mesh. The tools are described in Vertex Normal Tools.

Smooth Tool Enhancement

The Smooth tool now has a Volume Preservation option. When enabled, the smoothed mesh is more similar to the original in terms of shape and volume, while the topology is smoothed out. See Smooth for details. You can also do this with the Sculpt Smooth tool.

Baking

Bake Items and Baking Workflow

Modo uses Bake Items to store bake-related parameters on an item, which allows the baking of assets to be re-fired with exactly the same settings as the input data changes. This makes the baking process more automated. See Working with Bake Items and Baking Tools for more details.

Preview/RayGL Updates

Preview baking and RayGL in Bake mode can now get their settings from a bake item, simplifying the setup process. See Ray GL and Preview Bake Mode.

UDIMs

UDIM Baking

UDIM baking is now handled automatically. You can select the UDIM texture and bake it like any other texture in Modo. See Bake to UDIM Tiles for an example.

UDIM Wizard

This command automates the creation and setup of UDIM image sets, making it easier to set up UDIMs in Modo. For details see Creating UDIMs Using the UDIM Wizard.

UVs

UVs to SVG

This new feature offers a more modern alternative to the .eps format. Exporting UVs with UDIMS to .svg format gives new options for layering UDIMs and directly loading them into Modo as textures. For more information, see Export UVs to SVG.

Convert UVs to Mesh Improvement

The UVs to Mesh command can now write its output to a morph map in the same Mesh Item, as well as a separate item like before. Additionally, it can preserve polygon tags and vertex order on continuous UV maps. See Convert UVs to Mesh.

Color

Color Picker Enhancements

You can now use the Color Picker's own controls to adjust intensity and color for many material and texture properties. This avoids having to change selection while adjusting. You can also swap between the background and foreground colors for textures without having to leave the Color Picker. For more information, see Color Picker Viewport.

Normal Map Colorspace Conversion Prompting

When changing texture layers to Normal effect, or setting a clip to an image layer which has Normal effect, a dialog appears to ask if color correction should be auto-set to linear for the clip. See Normal for details.

Painting

Vertex Map Painting Updates

Vertex painting tools now have blend modes, and you can now paint discontinuous vertex colors. You also have the option to view each channel of the vertex map in isolation. For more information, see Vertex Map Paint.

 

Preview

Preview Bake to Texture support

We implemented preview baking to textures. This enables quick iterations while tweaking the baking result, similar to how it works for rendering. See Preview Bake Mode.

Dynamics

Soft Body Improvements

Soft Bodies now handle the combination of polygons and curves in the same item as a "hybrid" mesh. They interact, can collide, and share channel settings. Curves use the Bend and Struct values.

Soft Bodies have improved collisions both with self and other items, and improved goal matching.

The Pressure property is now a percentage, and scales internally based on the mass of the mesh, avoiding issues where changing the mass required changing the pressure value. For more information on Soft Bodies, see Dynamic Item.