Easily Share Presets with Assembly Presets

Occasionally workflows may involve having specific mesh items, materials, or environments that need to be imported into your scene or project.

Unlike presets, Assembly Presets create a .zip file containing all the supporting content of your preset - for example, texture images and meshes. This makes it easier to share presets between users. Additionally, assembly presets are directly tied to assemblies; when a preset is created, an assembly is also created. This means that it’s easier to keep track of all the supporting content within your preset, such as MeshOps, shaders, animations, or lights.

There are four types of preset:

Type

Explanation

General

Can contain collections of multiple items, even including full hierarchies of rigged elements.

Environment

Contains all environment items, such as lights, shadow catchers and any additional geo you might want in a custom environment

Mesh

Contains all meshes that were selected in the Items List when the preset was created

Material

Contains all material items, such as your shader, image maps, and any custom parameters that may exist within your material

Creating Material Presets

Depending on the type of preset you are creating, the method of creating an preset differs slightly.

To create a material assembly:

Creating Mesh, General or Environment Presets

To create a Mesh, Environment or general preset:

Note:   The type of preset you can create will depend on what you have selected in your Item or Shader list. For example, if you have a mesh selected the Save as Mesh Preset will be the type of preset available to you.

Assemblies and Presets

Whenever a new preset is made, a corresponding assembly is made alongside it. Assemblies can be viewed and edited from within the Schematic Viewport, by switching to the Overview view.

While editing your assembly in the schematic viewport, you can add additional nodes to change the type of assembly you have created. For example, adding a mesh to a material assembly will turn it into a mesh assembly. However, Modo will save the material preset allowing you to be able to switch between the two without having to create a new assembly.