Beginner Tutorial

If you've just opened Modo, the default configuration is OK to start the tutorial. If, however, you've been trying out the interface, it's a good idea to reset the workspace to the default (base) configuration. This guarantees that we're starting from the same place.

You can also reset the workspace if you run into trouble during the tutorial and want to start afresh.

Modo offers multiple interface layouts, each with a toolset targeted at a particular task. Layouts are selected using the tabs directly under the menu bar. For this tutorial, we'll use the Model layout. This layout is designed for creating 3D objects using object primitives (simple shapes), and it provides a large perspective view of the scene.

NOTE:  In the Perspective view, you see objects in three dimensions as you would in the real world. It's just like viewing the world through a camera viewfinder; you see the world in a rectangular window (viewport) and you can move the camera in space to see objects from a different position.

The work plane is the surface on which you draw objects. If you think about locating an object in 3D space, it's useful to have control over how it's first placed. For example, if you're modeling the inside of a room and want to add a poster, then it would make sense to first add the poster to the wall, and move it across the wall into the right position. In this case, we'd put the work plane on the wall. If you're adding a rug to the room, then it would be better to drop the rug onto the floor and move it along the floor plane, so the work plane should be aligned to the floor.

In Modo the work plane is a light-gray grid that automatically snaps to the plane that you are facing. Try rotating the viewport and see how the work plane changes.

TIP:  To rotate the viewport, hold Alt, click and drag in the viewport.

To pan the viewport, hold Alt+Shift, click and drag in the viewport.

Often in 3D modeling, we start with a simple shape and adjust it to resemble the main body of the object that is being modeled. Different parts of the object are then modeled separately to achieve the overall look.

If we look at the photo of the coffee mug, we can see the mug has two main parts, the body of the mug and the handle. We'll start by creating the mug body. The body itself resembles a tapered, hollow cylinder. So let's start by creating a cylinder that's standing on the ground plane. To do this, we'll first need to position the work plane.

Once placed, a primitive enters interactive mode and you can see the red, green and blue editing handles on the object. You can use the handles or edit property values to modify the primitive, and it updates immediately.

At the center of the cylinder there are three arrows for moving the cylinder, one for each axis. The red, green and blue arrows move along X, Y and Z respectively. The small, colored boxes on the surface of the cylinder are for adjusting the size along each axis.

TIP:  You can see the axis colors and the current orientation in the bottom-left of the viewport:

We'll adjust the size of the cylinder to roughly match that of the mug, then we'll sit the base on the ground (XZ) plane. The mug is approximately 90 mm wide and 100 mm tall. For sizing the cylinder, Modo uses the Radius property, which is half of the full length.

TIP:  Use Ctrl/Cmd+Z to undo. If you want to redo an operation, press Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+Z.

The instructions above are good practice for placing and sizing geometry. However, there is an alternative method which cuts out a few steps and is ideal if you want to place a primitive quickly. To do this, you first define the properties of the cylinder, including size and location, and draw the cylinder using the Apply button.

In the field of 3D modeling, you'll often hear the word 'mesh' used to describe 3D objects. A Mesh is the term given to the collection of vertices, edges and polygons that fit together to make up a 3D model.

Whilst working in Modo, your 3D objects are stored in a mesh layer, which is shown in the Item List to the right of the workspace. A Layer acts as a container for each type of item (such as a mesh), and allows you to focus your work on the contents of the layer. Layers may contain items such as lights, or cameras, and if you want to edit these items, you can switch to the appropriate layer.

The collection of all the layers in a file is called a Scene. When you render your work, Modo draws the entire scene using the items in the scene's layers.

To shape the body of the mug, we need to taper the cylinder so that the base is smaller than the top. The simplest way to do this is to shrink the polygon at the base of the cylinder.

So far we've been working in Items selection mode, which applies operations to all of the geometry in the current mesh layer.

To manipulate individual polygons, we need to go into Polygons selection mode. You can then select a polygon by clicking on it.

NOTE:  In any selection mode, unless you select something, Modo uses the implied selection, which is everything in the layer. For example, if you are in Polygons selection mode and nothing is selected, any transform you apply affects all polygons.

NOTE:  Selections are highlighted yellow. You can deselect everything by clicking on empty space in the 3D viewport (when no tool is active) or by pressing Esc.

To select multiple elements, click and drag over the geometry. This is known as paint based selection.

To add to the current selection, hold Shift and click to select the element.

To remove something from the current selection, hold Ctrl/Cmd and click on the selected element.

To create the interior of the mug, we need to add more polygons to the top of the cylinder so that we can drag down to create a hole. If we were to drag the top polygon as it stands, the entire mug would be flattened. To remedy this, we can use the Bevel tool to add an inner ring of polygons to the top.

We'll need to bevel twice. Once to create the rim of the mug, and again to create the inside base of the mug.

NOTE:  You may have noticed that when the mouse hovers over a particular element, its color changes. This is called pre-highlighting, and it indicates that the element is selectable.

TIP:  To apply a second bevel, we can drop the Bevel tool and add it again. However, Modo provides a shortcut. With the first bevel active, simply Shift click in the viewport to reset the tool and apply a new bevel.

The mug in the photo has nice rounded edges, unlike our model, so we need to round them using the Edge Bevel tool.

Since we only want to affect the edges at the corners of the mug, we need to select only those edges. The corners occur at the rim of the mug, inside around the base, and around the outside base. Once the edges are selected, we can apply the Edge Bevel tool to add more edges and create a rounding effect.

Selecting edges manually can be time-consuming. Luckily, Modo provides a number of ways to speed up selections.

To select all the edges around the border of an area of polygons, first select the polygons, then hold Ctrl/Cmd. You'll see that the Edges mode button becomes Bounds. With Ctrl/Cmd still held, select Bounds mode and the bounding edges are selected automatically.

TIP:  To select all the edges in a loop, in Edges mode, select two adjacent edges and press L. Selecting two elements determines the direction of the loop. Loop selection also works for polygons and vertices.

To save your work, select File > Save or press Ctrl/Cmd + S to open the save dialog. Name your file 'mug', and save it to a directory.

When you save, the scene name in the Items List in the upper-right of the Modo interface changes to the filename.

NOTE:  When you open Modo, the scene is called Untitled by default, and a small asterisk is shown by the scene to indicate that it hasn't been saved.

Now let's start to build the handle. You'd be right in thinking that we could model the handle as a separate object and join it to the body of the mug. Though possible, one of the drawbacks with that approach is that it makes it harder to guarantee one continuous smooth surface across the object. Instead, we'll add edges to the side of the mug so that we can grow the handle outwards from the body and preserve continuity.

A quick way to add edges is with the Loop Slice tool. To use this we first need to select the surface polygons that we want to slice.

NOTE:  We could have added the extra edges when making the cylinder. However, this would have made shaping the cylinder more difficult. If we started with more edges on the side, shaping the bottom polygon would only taper the single row of polygons above it, and not the whole cylinder.

In this stage we'll introduce the Action Center feature. Put simply, the Action Center defines the origin around which a transformation occurs. To make sure an edge grows outwards from its center, we need to set the Action Center to Local. This places the Action Center at the center of a selection.

NOTE:  To understand how an action center works, consider the hands on a clock face. The action center of rotation for each hand is at the center of the clock face. Any changes to the action center change the rotation path of the hand. If, say, you put the action center at the number six on the bottom of the clock face, the hand rotates around a circle whose center is located on the number six.

You've made the mug body, now let's make the attachment points (or buds) for the handle.

In order to give the handle its slightly rounded shape, we need to shape the area where the handle attaches to the body to be hexagonal. We can do this by lengthening a vertical edge between two polygons, as shown below.

NOTE:  Later, we'll use Modo to round the hexagon into a smooth oval.

The height of each bud is a little too tall, so let's scale them down.

TIP:  To speed up the selection, Modo offers some shortcuts. By holding Shift and pressing the Up arrow, you can extend the selection to include the neighboring polygons.

So far we've been working in the Perspective view, which shows a 3D view of the object and allows us to explore the space in all axes by 360 degrees. This view is great for most of our needs, but sometimes it's easier to switch to one of the Orthographic views to do some detail work. Orthographic simply means that we view the object looking from one side, and see it in two dimensions.

There are several orthographic views in Modo, including Top, Front and Right. Working in an orthographic view is ideal if you want to focus on a specific side, or limit transforms to two dimensions. You can see the default orthographic views in a four-view layout by clicking on the double arrow icon in the top-right corner of the perspective view .

The window on the top-right shows the perspective view. By default, the orthogonal views are drawn in Wireframe mode. Wireframe mode shows objects as wire meshes, drawn using only vertices and edges. You can see the type of view and the draw mode in the top-left of each window.

The next steps rely on the buds being aligned with the X-axis, such that if you look from the Top view, the buds extend to the left with the X-axis at their center, as shown below.

The lasso selection method lets you select regions of an object by drawing a boundary around the region. To use the lasso, press and hold the right or middle mouse button and drag the selection lasso.

NOTE:  A polygon is only included in the selection if the entire polygon is within the lasso boundary.

An orthogonal view. The mug handle has been selected using a right-mouse lasso selection.	The result of the lasso selection as seen in the orthogonal view.	The selection as seen in the perspective view. Note how the selection includes both sides of the handle.

NOTE:  You can use either the right-mouse or middle-mouse when drawing a lasso with different results. In Wireframe view, right-mouse + drag selects elements at the front and any that are occluded, middle-mouse + drag selects only elements in front.

In a non-wireframe draw mode, such as Default, the reverse applies.

The next step is to connect the two buds using the Bridge tool. This tool creates new tube geometry that connects two selected areas. To help Modo make a good bridge, the connection surfaces must be slightly inclined towards each other.

NOTE:  You can use the Bridge tool with polygons or edges.

Instead of moving the geometry as a single rigid piece, the falloff lets you move one area more than another, with a soft fade between the two extremes. This lets you apply bulges or slopes to a surface easily.

A falloff is often drawn as a wireframe in the viewport (depending on the type), with editing handles to change the shape of the falloff and adjust its intensity.

You can add falloffs to a tool separately, or, in the case of some tools (including the Soft Move tool), a falloff is added automatically to give the tool its characteristic behavior. In both cases, the falloff and the transform are shown as two separate tools in the viewport.

There are several types of falloff, each describing a different shape for the falloff region. For example, a Linear falloff is drawn as a wedge shape, where the geometry closer to the narrow end of the wedge is affected less than the geometry at the wide end. The amount of the affect has a gradual, linear change along the length of the falloff.

The images below compare the effect of a vertical (Y-axis) translate with and without a Linear falloff.

 

The original object.
	The object is translated in the Y-axis, without a falloff.
	The object is translated in the Y-axis using a linear falloff. You can see the falloff above the object.

The Soft Move tool uses a spherical falloff. The geometry at the center of the sphere is affected the most, and the effect softens to zero at the edge of the sphere. This lets us move the geometry with minimal changes at the edges of the drag region.

We've made the geometry for the handle, but it doesn't match the shape in the original photo. To fix this, Modo has a palette of tools to deform shapes and bend geometry.

In this case, we'll use the Soft Move tool. The Soft Move tool lets us drag geometry in any direction. This is similar to the regular translate tool (W key) but the Soft Move tool uses a falloff.

In our model, the top of the handle is wider than the top, but in the original mug, the handle is an even width along its length. This can be fixed with the Rotate tool. We just need to rotate each side of the handle slightly to straighten them up.

TIP:  To quickly select elements in a strip, select the first two elements and then keep pressing Up to select the rest.

Although similar in shape to the original, the model of the mug is made of flat polygons and has a blocky appearance. To fix this, we can apply subdivision surface smoothing to automatically add detail to the mug and give it a smooth, rounded appearance.

Finally, we'll give the mug a color similar to the one in the photo. In Modo, color and other surface details of an object are stored in a Material.