Save Animation: This option, when enabled, exports the entire animated frame range in the Alembic file. When disabled, only the current frame is exported.

Sanitize Names: When enabled, simplifies names by removing spaces, parentheses, and other non-standard characters that cause problems with certain importers.

COLLADA Export

For user convenience, the Absolute Path, Merge Reference Items, Unit System, and Up Axis settings are included in both their original locations on the Accuracy and Units, and Scene Export panels, as well as in the COLLADA Export panel. Changing any of these settings in the COLLADA Export panel also changes the value globally, so the new setting value also updates in the original preference group panels.

Absolute Path: When this option is enabled, Modo writes all link references (such as those to images, MDDs and IES files) as absolute paths, referencing their location to specific areas of a disc drive when saving files. When disabled, Modo uses relative paths to locate linked files.

Merge Reference Items: When utilizing scene reference items, enable this option to embed the referenced items into the scene file when saving, instead of having them remain external entities.

Unit System: You can choose your preferred measurement units system based on several options. Once set, this is the measurement input method Modo uses for all numerical input values. This value is also exported in the COLLADA scene's Asset tag. The following options are available:

• SI: The International System of Units (abbreviated 'SI') is the modern form of the metric system, complies to universal base units.

• Metric: A universal system of measurement based on powers of 10 -millimeter, centimeter, meter, kilometer.

• English: A historical measurement system based on Imperial Units -mils, inch, foot, yard and mile

• Game Units: An arbitrary unit of measurement (defined by the Meters per Game Unit setting).

• Unitless: An arbitrary decimalized unit of measurement based on cubic meters. 1 unit = 1m.

Default Unit: This option is dependent on the Unit System and determines the default unit used when no unit is specified.

Meters Per Game Unit: When utilizing the arbitrary Game Units system, use this value to determine the scale of a single unit. This allows you to work with even whole numbers. So if a 1 m equivalent is really 1.375 real world meters in Modo, you can enter 1.375 here and then specify units normally in the numerical input fields.

Up Axis: This option determines the major axis that is considered the default up direction for Modo. 3D programs typically use Y as up, whereas CAD applications typically use Z as the up direction. When importing geometry, if it is always 90° off, changing the up axis to match the originating application may resolve the issue. This can also be set separately for each scene in the Scene Item.

Save Hidden Items: Saves items that are hidden in the Items list (that the eye icon next to the item's name is toggled off).

Save Cameras/Lights/Locators: This controls whether or not cameras, lights or locators are saved with the scene.

Save Triangles as Triangles: Saves Mesh Items that are constructed of triangles using the COLLADA <triangles> element, instead of the more general-purpose <polylist> element.

Order Vertex Maps Alphabetically: Enabled by default, this option organizes Vertex Maps into alphabetical order.

Bake Matrices: The COLLADA format can represent Modo's stack (or layers) of multiple transform elements, so that more than one rotation, position, or scale can be applied to a single item in series. For compatibility with other applications, Bake Matrices reduces such a transform stack down to a single transform by pre-multiplying the results before export.

Save Vertex Normals: Enables the saving of normals for each geometry vertex.

Save UV Texture Coordinates: Enables the saving of one or more UV texture coordinate maps for each Mesh Item.

Save Vertex Colors/Weights: Enables the saving of the Color and Weight Vertex Maps.

Save Animation: This option enables or disables the output of animation channels. When Save Animation is disabled, all item values are sampled at the first frame of any animated channels.

Sample Animation/Sample Start Frame and Sample End Frame: Creates a keyframe value at every frame within the range specified by the Start and End Frame settings. This option is useful when exporting to applications that can't interpolate all of the animation channels in a given file.

Z-near and Z-far: The Z-buffers on 3D graphics cards have limited resolution, and so these settings describe the closest and furthest points that may be displayed for a given scene. Z-near and Z-far are not applicable for the types of rendering performed by Modo, but they are useful for interactive 3D applications where this information can be used to optimize the resolution of the hardware Z buffer.

Save modo Profile: This option provides a human-readable form of all of Modo's items and their internal channels and animation envelopes, and also allows the Modo COLLADA importer to re-import assets with the same Modo-specific items and their channels and envelopes. A full description of the Modo profile is beyond the scope of this document, so please refer to the Collada I/O documentation included with the File I/O SDK for additional details (available in Modo's help directory as part of the SDK).

Save Maya/3ds Max/Okino/XSI Profile: Determines whether application-specific tags are exported or not.

Formatted Arrays: This option breaks up long lists of values into related groups on separate lines, which makes the output text easier to read.

COLLADA Import

Import Units: This option, when enabled, reads and applies the unit's information from a COLLADA file to the imported Modo scene.

Import Up Axis: This option, when enabled, reads and applies the Up axis information from a COLLADA file to the imported Modo scene.

Export Version: You can choose which .fbx format version you wish to export to when saving .fbx format files from Modo.

Export Type: This option controls what elements from the scene are exported. All Items within the scene, only the selected elements, or selected elements and their hierarchies (children).

Save as Text Format: When this option is enabled, Modo generates human-readable TXT formatted .fbx files. When disabled, Modo generates binary encoded .fbx files.

NOTE:  TXT readable files can be many times the size of binary encoded FBX files.

Save Geometry: When this option is enabled, Modo exports all polygonal geometry (mesh) items.

Save Cameras: When this option is enabled, Modo exports all camera items.

Save Lights: When this option is enabled, Modo exports all light items.

Save Materials: When this option is enabled, Modo exports materials as best as possible.

NOTE:  Due to the nature of different rendering systems, complex material setups can't be transferred, but baking can be used to create image maps that can be transferred.

Save Polygon Parts: When this option is enabled, Modo exports polygon Part tags.

Save Selection Sets: When this option is enabled, Modo exports defined selection sets.

Save Mesh Smoothing: When this option is enabled, an FBX-specific command is used to compute geometric normals upon export. It is known to increase export times on large meshes, and therefore should remain disabled, unless it is absolutely necessary.

Save Smoothing Groups: When this option is enabled, any vertex smoothing maps assigned to geometry are exported.

Save Morph Maps: When this option is enabled, Modo exports morph maps as compatible blend shapes in the .fbx format.

Save Tangent Basis: When this option is enabled, the tangent and bitangent normal basis states will be written to the FBX file when saved.

Save Animation: When this option is enabled, Modo exports keyframed animations.

Sample Animation: When this option is enabled, Modo re-samples the animations, resulting in a baked type of animation with continuous keyframes defined by the Animation Sample Rate at either every frame (1x) or twice for every frame (2x).

Export Actions: This option toggles between not exporting Actions per actor, or to convert the Actions into FBX format Takes.

Projection: Since HPGL is a flat, 2D format, the Projection option defines the plane that it is converted to for the final export. Automatic tries to determine the best guess plane, with options to define a specific plane or the UVs for the object.

Scale: You can define a default scaling amount when importing HPGL files, eliminating the need to manually scale drawing after they are inserted into a scene.

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JPEG

Quality: This option determines the image/compression quality of images saved from Modo into .jpg. 100% is maximum quality possible with .jpg, lower values reduce the file's overall size, but also degrade image quality.

Sub-Sampling: The JPEG file format compresses images by separating the color and luminance (brightness) information. Most people are more sensitive to contrast than they are to color variations, so this information is separated into channels, where each can be compressed differently. This compression amount is expressed through the sampling or sub-sampling value. The default save option, 4:1:1, represents each channel where the luminous channel has four times as much information as two combined color channels. This can make image files quite small, but produces softness on areas of high color contrast. The 4:2:2 option provides double the amount of color fidelity, and the 4:4:4 has the highest quality, saving the same number of data samples for each channel, but also produces the largest of the JPEG compressed file sizes.

Image Cache

Limit Image Load Size: When this option is enabled, Modo limits the size of large bitmap images when imported and rendered, based on the setting of the Maximum Image Load Size. As large images are loaded, they are resized, so they take about the same memory as a square image with the given dimensions. This can be useful if you're editing a model that's been textured with very large maps and don't need to see them in detail.

WARNING:  This preference affects rendering.

Maximum size that an image will be loaded: Determines the maximum pixel length for any image imported. Images larger than this setting are resized to fit the specified value.

Image Tile Cache Size: The amount of space dedicated to holding resized images in memory. The more images get loaded and resized, the more memory is necessary to hold them all.

Image Format

Default Image Format: You can use this option to determine the default format when saving Modo-generated bitmap images. You can select alternate format types in the file Save dialog, this option only determines the default when you use Save as.

PNG

Compression Level: The .png format uses a lossless compression scheme similar to ZIP. Values span from 1 to 9, with 9 being the greatest amount of compression. The compression amount doesn't affect the visual quality of the images, but it affects compression and decompression performance, which can be useful when playing back image sequences.

OpenEXR Export

Compression: When saving OpenEXR images, you are provided with a number of different compression offerings: uncompressed, lossless, and lossy compression types. It is best to test the setting for the intended purpose to make sure the format chosen is compatible with the intended target.

DWA Compression Level: This option determines the amount of lossy compression applied to the EXR image when saved, the higher the value the greater the compression. but also the more likely to introduce visible artifacts. The default value of 45 should be visibly lossless, but with a smaller saved file size.

Tile Size: When the Generate Mip Map Levels option is enabled, the Tile Size option defines the size of the pre-generated tiles of the resulting Mipmapped EXR image. 16 or 32 sized tiles are good values for textures ultimately used in Modo.

Generate Mip Map Levels: If this option is enabled, mip map levels are generated when saving OpenEXR files from Modo. Mipmapping is an optimized collection of pre-calculated image maps that are filtered and scaled, and used to reduce image overhead when loading and rendering high resolution files. When disabled, only the full resolution file is saved.

OpenEXR Loader

Limit Tile Memory: When this option is enabled, you can use the EXR Tile Memory Limit setting to define a maximum amount of memory that Modo uses to load all EXR images into a scene. When disabled, Modo fully loads all EXR images into memory.

EXR Tile Memory Limit: When the Limit Tile Memory option is enabled, you can define an upper memory limit used to cache OpenEXR mip map tiles. When the maximum amount is reached, the EXR image loader discards the oldest tiles based on when they were last used. If a tile is required later on, it is reloaded into memory and older tiles get discarded, if necessary.

Cache Tiles to Disk: When this option is enabled, purged mip map tiles are stored in the drive's temporary directory in a raw, uncompressed format until they are needed again. This reduces overhead associated with opening and decompressing full size EXR images. This information is destroyed and recreated each time Modo is closed and started, respectively.

Load SubPatch as Subdiv: When this option is enabled, any geometry generated in LightWave using SubPatch geometry smoothing technique automatically converts to Modo's standard Subdiv when imported.

Save Subdiv as SubPatch: Any geometry modeling Modo as a Subdivision Surface can be converted to LightWave's Subpatch mode upon export to LightWave format.

Content Directory: LightWave supports a content directory structure to make moving scene files around easily. When loading scene dependent on Content Directories, it is helpful to specify the LightWave equivalent path prior to loading and saving the file to aid Modo in locating the appropriate assets (namely image maps) into and out of Modo.

Save Flat Transforms: Saving full Modo scenes to LWO object files means saving out all the meshes to mesh layers. Typically, the item transformations applied in Modo are not applied to the mesh, so it is positioned as if the item mode rotation, scale and positioning were all reset. Turning on this option freezes all the layers of item transformation, so the entire hierarchy is exported as if modeled in that pose. This behavior may be undesirable if you are rigging the layers later on.

Texture Conversion: This option attempts to reproduce the LW texturing in the Shader Tree. Use this if exporting textures unchanged back to LWO is not important.

Text Encoding: Set the text encoding. The available options are UTF-8 and System Defaults.

Video Format

Default Video Format: You can use this option to determine the default format when saving Modo-generated video files. You can select alternate format types in the file Save dialog, this option only determines the default when you use the Save As command.

STL Object Export

Interpret Export units as: The STL file format has no inherent scale information, so systems generally default to several standard values. Depending on the target, you can use the Interpret units as option to define a scale unit when exporting STL format files.

Save as ASCII: When the Save as ASCII option is enabled, saving a file generates the less common ASCII (human readable text) format. When disabled, resulting STL files are saved in the more common binary format.

Interpret Import units as: The STL file format has no inherent scale information, so systems generally default to several standard values. Depending on the target, you can use the Interpret import units as option to define a scale unit when importing an STL format file.

Wavefront Object Import

Import as Static Mesh: When this option is enabled, OBJ geometry is imported as non-editable static Mesh Items. This is useful when importing huge geometry files that can slow down scene interactivity.

Import Groups as Separate Meshes: When this option is enabled, defined groups within the OBJ file generate multiple Mesh Item layers for each.

Suppress Import Options Dialog: This option, when enabled, suppresses the pop-up window that opens when importing an OBJ file.

Import Units: You can determine a scaling amount for imported elements automatically, by choosing from the various Import Units.

Wavefront Object Export

Save Meshes as Groups: When enabled, the export utilizes the G group tag to define geometry sections within the file. When disabled, the export uses the O object tag.

Save Material File: When this option is enabled, an additional MTL file is generated when exporting OBJ files that contains the basic surface definitions and links to textures. When disabled, the MTL file is skipped.

Save Deformed Geometry at Current Scene Time: With this option enabled, Modo freezes the current deformation state of the exported element at the current Timeline position, producing a deformed mesh.

Export Units: You can determine a scaling amount for exported elements automatically by choosing from the various Export Units.