Modo 11 dropped by The Foundry

Do you remember the time when these things would have press releases and sneak peaks to get people excited?
https://community.foundry.com/discuss/topic/130969/modo11-0-is-now-available

The release seems like a mixed bag if the discussion is anything to go by. People who use Modo for its existing toolset will like the large number of usability and performance improvements done across the board, but people expecting overhauled tools and new tools in historically weak areas will be disappointed. In a way, they are playing it safe and focusing mainly on where the application already shines.

Also new is the start of subscription options for licensing, it looks like they are doing away with upgrade fees and replacing it with a maintenance plan (probably sensible if they are now release every 4 months). There is some speculation as to whether permanent licenses will disappear in the future, but it’s only hearsay unless it actually happens.

Thoughts on the new release, too safe, too small, or one big home-run?

I have a license of Modo. Supposedly, if you have a perpetual license now, you can buy the “Maintenance” plan for a year and get all the new versions. Once your plan expires, you’ll still have a license for the latest version that was released while your plan was active.

So if you have 11 and during the year they release 11.1, 11.2, 11.3 and 11.4, you’ll still have a license for 11.4 when your plan expires, but you won’t get 11.5 unless you renew.

The maintenance plan also gives access to tech support… which I guess means you don’t get tech support if you don’t have a plan??

Hey, there. On i5 4-core CPU, GTX 1070, SSD and 16 GB RAM Modo 11 performs realy bad:

Guess I’ll keep using Blender and my old Modo 10 Indie for now.

To defend Modo just a little bit here. The release cycle is a bit different these days, with smaller releases happening over the course of a year rather than one big explosive feature release full of marketing material. Blender does the same. If 11 is starting with an assortment of bug fixes and performance tweaks, it makes sense not to try and advertise that too much. The fixes needed to happen.

To be fair, the video maker didnt toggle the new animation cache deformers, which would have made it at lot smoother. It is worth pointing out though that Blender does perform very well with animations.

I almost threw out my own computer out of the windows.

One of the devs responded to this video in particular:

“Most of the performance hit comes from preparing the mesh data for display in the 3D viewport. This involves taking the cage mesh, subdividing it, calculating normals…etc. This data we submit to the graphics card has been cached in 10.2, so it’s much faster once it’s cached. However, generating the data to cache is still slow. We’re working on that, but it’s a long term project with significant changes.”

I’ve been using Modo since 501 and I absolutely loved it in the 501-701 days. But now there are major bugs being completely ignored by the Foundry stuff. And it turns out that I can rely on Blender more now for it’s stability and performance. That’s just my experience with Modo 10-11.

As a hobbyist who jumped into modo in 301 and stayed till 801, I really enjoyed using the program even though it always had annoying bugs and some instability issues. As the program became more feature rich it eventually became too expensive for me to keep upgrading or renting.

I’ve since moved to blender and as I learn more about the program I am continually impressed with just how good it is.

Not related with the topic, sorry, but may I ask how the user detach the curve editor in a new window?

Cheers!

Don’t be sorry, this is a forum about an app. I think questions and help and tricks should be vented here. :slight_smile:

You know that little edge on views you click and drag to resize views? Drag that while holding shift the view will pop out to a separate window.

I also kinda wanna remember that from the menu with all the views/editor in the header, that you could hold alt+shift and click or something like that, and the selected view popped out into a new window. Might be wrong - since I can’t get it to work now.


like this.

Modo 10 is really stable, but as I read from some beta testers 11 is even more stable. Also in MODO slack group there are some users reporting that MODO 11 flies now with instances and replicators. I will get my copy these days to check myself.
But pricing is gr8 imho.

antonboiko

That is not surprising. Cinema 4d is also probably as slow or only marginally faster than Modo when dealing with (not even very complex) Rigs.
It would be an interesting comparison if you could throw your character into Maya.

If you want to animate and have fast feedback, i would suggest to avoid C4d or Modo and stick with Blender or Maya.

2017 seems to be the year of underwhelming 3D DCC releases. First Max now Modo, both seem disappointing at first glance.

Not a problem)) To detach a viewport into separate window you just hold Shift and click-drag the small corner icon on the bottom left of the view you want to detach, it’s the fastets method I know.

Hey, SaintHaven. Unfortunately, caching deformers does not help with lagging UI or editing animation curves, it’s only useful for animation playback. And as a professional animator I can tell you that it’s a complete waste of time - hitting this Cache Deformrs button every time you modify some keys on a curve))

Hey, Romanji. Here is a Maya test:

I’m a professional animator so I do use Maya for my main work, simply because it’s an industry standard and large studios are Maya-only (well, sometimes Softimage). But for a generalist kind of work I prefered to use Modo (alongside Blender), it has much better rigging system, baking and rendering is insanely robust too. But now Modo is getting nowhere and I use Blender almost exclusively.

Nice, thanks for that.
Its really nice to see that Blender is so fast when displaying animations.

Yeah, the issue is that Modo’s scene dependency graph is just really, really slow. Unfortunately it means they need to spend a lot of time and effort optimizing it.

Modo currently is my main 3D program and I love it. Yet I also hate it so much. And that feeling can change very quickly over the course of a day. Sometimes even over the course of an hour. :wink:

Things like this are a part of the reason for it.

Just getting back into Blender after a long hiatus I find that Modo was inspired quite a lot by Blender, actually. I wishid Blender would return the favor and be inspired by some of the nice things from Modo in return. :smiley:

I really miss Ctr-C / Ctrl-V copy pasting of polygon selections from one mesh into another. And macro recording as well as mapping commands and macros to a shortcut immediately.