Modo 10.0v1 released

The first installment of the MODO 10 Series, MODO 10.0v1, offers significantly enhanced workflows for creating real-time content for games, or for other immersive interactive experiences like virtual reality. With it, you can:author in MODO and be confident that your assets will look virtually the same in Unity or Unreal Engine, easily get realistic detail into your real-time assets with a streamlined, repeatable texture baking workflow, export to popular engines with simple, automated steps that minimize the need to recreate work.

The Modo 10 Series will be released in three installments, for a single price you can choose when to upgrade from 902 or earlier or purchase a new seat, and you’ll receive all three installments as they become available. Modo 10.0v1 will be followed by the releases of Modo 10.1 and Modo 10.2.

New features:

• Enhanced control of normals – Now you can explicitly manipulate vertex normals to control shading smoothness on low-polygon assets, with a series of tools that let you select individual edges to be smoothed or unsmoothed, constructing a vertex normal map on the mesh. What’s more, in addition to generating tangent basis data suitable for use with normal maps in Unreal, we’ve added the ability to create data suitable for use in both Unity and Source.

• Streamlined export to games engines – Now you can transfer assets between MODO and Unity or Unreal Editor 4 with shading information intact, eliminating the need to recreate shading work in the games engine editor. What’s more, exporting to games engines is now single-step operation, thanks to a new preset mechanism with ready-made presets for Unreal and Unity, and the ability to create custom presets to target additional engines. In addition meshes are now automatically triangulated on FBX export—matching MODO's internal triangulation for GL rendering and ensuring a visual match—and there’s now direct support for a range of common DDS image formats.

• Real-time content creation workflows – MODO 10 offers workflows specifically targeted at artists creating content for real-time applications. The Games Tools layout is centered around the everyday tasks of vertex normal editing, texture baking and exporting to game engines, while still providing quick access to modeling tools. In addition, you can now navigate through your MODO scene as you would a video game level, with a new FPS (First Person Shooter) mode that uses the mouse to look around, and the keyboard to move—enabling you to evaluate your scene as a player would see it.

• WYSIWYG asset creation experience for games and VR authoring - MODO 10 delivers a WYSIWYG look-development experience for games authoring that lets you work in the context of your final delivery platform. Now you can develop and view looks for game art that correspond to lighting and surface details in real-time game engines, with two new physically based material types which closely match the materials in Unreal Engine and Unity; several enhancements to the advanced photorealistic viewport, including support for viewing and exporting the Unity and Unreal-compatible PBR materials; and the ability to work with the Unreal Editor 4 and Unity 5 base shaders directly in MODO.
• FBX enhancements – Delivering better compatibility for real-time engines, a new FBX 2015 plug-in offers support for the widely-used FBX 2014 format; the ability to export UV sets alphabetically; and automatic application of default (linear) color correction to vector maps in all loaded clips including FBX and other non-LXO formats. What’s more, animation from FBX files can now be imported and merged onto items in the scene, or applied to actors as actions, while instances and replicators can now be exported to FBX.
• Efficient baking - MODO’s baking workflow is now more automated and streamlined. New Bake Items let you store bake-related parameters for reuse, so you can initiate a bake process with different input data, but using exactly the same bake settings as previously. What’s more, when preview and RayGL baking, you can now take settings from a Bake Item, so you can tweak settings and see the results before executing the final operation. To make baking even easier, a new Bake Wizard streamlines the setup of Bake Items and baking, and offers customizable output presets.
• Enhanced UV and UDIM workflows

Read the release notes. More on The Foundry’s website.