They would definitely be heading in the right direction, but it appears the stability issues of the past combined with their misadventures trying to attract the shoe industry is just too much to overcome at this point.
Perhaps the video will be enough to attract a buyer involved in the VFX industry (that is not Autodesk, Maxon, or DAZ), but there is not a high chance of that at the moment.
I kind of lost touch with Modo.
But my brief encounter with v6 left a clear idea of the challenge to complete an app that is fully featured from scratch.
2011, if my recollection is correct. Or 2012 in that time frame.
V6 came with a lot of hype about it finally had come to maturity. But it was not really with all the features yet.
From the perspective of considering the competition which you could argue was LightWave CORE at the time, there must have been pressure to deliver on the promise of transforming what was basically LightWave into a new app with Modo.
Even if CORE was officially scrapped by that time it was promised that CORE would come to fruition from inside LightWave.
My point is that they probably jumped the gun and missed the opportunity to get LightWave and other users on board who were looking for an end to end solution. And in the case of LightWave users, they went elsewhere.
And so it just took, what, another 5 years for it to mature?
By that time the market changed.
And I donât know much beyond that.
I just lost interest. Came back to it from time to time and tried it. But it never stuck.
It does seem that Blender was the unexpected wild card that tipped the scale.
Modo was supposed to be the alternative cost effective end to end go to tool following in LightWaveâs footsteps. It got lost somewhere along the way.
Meanwhile Blender slid comfortably into that role.
Accurate assessment IMHO.
even if you break things into specialty areas
the hi-res sculpting enthusiasts
have Zbrush.
The hard surface & Character animators have Maya & Max and those who avoid Autodesk (for whatever reasons), have Blender.
The 3D motion graphics guys have Cinema4D
The Pro VFX users have SideFX Houdini.
All of these apps have high end render engines
(native or third party)
and this does not even consider the variables that Game engines like UE introduced for rendering.
So, despite what MODO offers I do not see how they could have really distinguished themselves in todays market environment.
One thing that is easy to forget or overlook, is the fact that Modo initially was a modeling app.
It was basically a relatively inexpensive addon to LightWave and a lot of LightWave users were using it along side LightWave.
It was all of the things the developers couldnât do with the old Modeler code.
LightWave had secured its place in Rendering pipelines along side Maya as a cost effective render solution.
So Modo was filling a much needed gap. Probably for Maya pipelines as well.
So Modo did quite well in that role for a good 10 years and seemed to be the only reliable place to go for Modeling innovation as far as tools were concerned.
They also tried to introduce rendering as well.
But primarily their user base was modelers.
In hindsight of course it was a failed approach. Short-sighted. And am I being harsh to say that it was similar shortsighted choices that these very same developers made which ultimately led to them abandoning LightWave code?
So now if you look at development resources and compare it to Blender, it could be argued that it would have been better in the long run for them to pitch a fundamental tent around all of the necessary tools and attract users to use it as a general purpose tool. Much like Blender was back then.
This would have meant not trying to attract current professionals who needed modeling tools, but instead, offering a low cost end-to-end alternative to young users and students who could do everything from modeling to animation in the same tool.
If you look at Blenderâs history of never being taken seriously. And almost the brunt of jokes among professional users. It was mocked as a toy not being used by professionals.
But a sobering reality as a rebuttal to that was the fact that many LightWave users were moving to Blender for modeling. Because even in its primitive form, it was doing most of the things right. It had an even more well thought out approach to transform planes than Modo.
While it might not have offered some of the Smooth Shift family of tools in Modeler and Modo, it did offer alternative methods and a modifier stack for non-destructive modeling operations.
And if you understood how to use Blender - the Blender way - like myself and many modeling-centric artists did, you quickly found you could do anything you needed and were not wanting the antiquated old approaches to modeling.
The added advantage was you were also working in an environment that had a much more modern workflow for rigging and animation.
And to be honest, having used Maya extensively, even far more flexible and useful than Maya as a rigging tool.
Animation still lacks a bit now. ButâŚ.
The take away here is that Modo went straight for the modeling market.
While Blender quietly improved as a generalist tool.
And it grew with its young user base who went from literally teenage years into professional level positions as freelance artists and/or even small studio owners. Some even went on to work at small studios using Blender.
For me it was not my young years. But my early years in a new career that I started at 50.
There was a brief moment where I felt I had outgrown Blender but it didnât last long and Blender just kept maturing.
Over the last 10 years I have been in a close relationship with a local university and I have hired students, run internships, and therefore kept a finger on the pulse of young users who independently were finding Blender.
All the while universally, none of them have heard much about LighWave or Modo and none of them used either.
They usually would hear about those apps from me.
So that says it all right there.
EDIT:
Just another thing to add that I kind of glossed over.
The fact that Blender grew as a professional tool and attracts professional users.
And even when people were mocking it, that entire time, 2010 and forward, Blender was catering to an indie developer market that only much too late did other apps realize even existed.
Modo even tried to tap into that.
Blender was free and easily accessible. And this can not be overlooked either.
Because for these indie developers cost of software was in fact prohibitive to the business model.
However if commercial apps had their finger on the pulse sooner they would have offered a low cost alternative.
Now we canât over look the even more obvious fact. Even if there were opinions otherwise Blender was a real cool capable and useful tool that was easily to learn and integrate into lots of pipelines.
Blender was good. People found that out. And post 2.8 it even got better and more familiar with more users.
LightWave team should hang it up. Stop lying to its users. Follow Modoâs lead.
Itâs over.
This is an important thing to note, because I do not believe that Blenderâs strong position now was obtained entirely by its own merits with a presentation of powerful, polished tools and features.
The BF has made a lot of unforced errors over the years and then often took a long time to fix them. If the commercial vendors never dropped low-cost, permissive, perpetual licensing options along with keeping their R&D departments robust, Blender wouldâve not even made inroads into the indie scene and instead wouldâve remained the domain of hobbyists and hardcore FOSS afficionados (with continued reliance on fundraisers in a bid to have hired developers).
In the eyes of many users, helping Blender grow was far and away the less painful option even if it meant missing some tools they took for granted. In an odd way, we can be thankful for Autodesk and friends doing these things because it now means the existence of viable production software for free.
Well I agree to a degree in part.
Certainlly no one can dissagree that Blender has lacked certain features over the years. And for many people it was the better option even if it meant dealing with missing some features.
But it was not at all purely financial.
I donât think you can point to one thing and say this would have changed everything.
For starters, what I said about other apps having a finger on the pulse.
It was Blender that exposed this market.
And it happened long before subscription was available. And subscription was not the thing that drove it. Many will dissagree with me. But it is the minority of people who actually are against subscription. And subscription was the asnswer to Blender already gaining sucess not the reason it gained sucess. And it was the only thing that could have saved Adobe and Autodesk. They released - and this can be proven historically with fact - Maya LT on subscription to directly compete with Blender, saying it was targeting the indie game developer. That was Blenderâs market. It happened organically. No one saw it coming.
I can say this with certainty because I worked with some of these mobile app developers when that market was exploading. Blender was the main app these indie game developers were using.
Everything grows or shrinks. Nothing stays the same. Blender was growing. And it was - and is still - driving the market.
Of course many donât want to admit that. Seems like a lot of people want to point the finger at other reasons.
The simple answer is that Blender was a capable and useful tool.
Modo team simply failed to grasp the idea that there was a new generation of users coming who would not just be graduating from a university and getting jobs in studios or starting a freelance career.
Or who were established professionals.
It is the Autodesk model - free student software - which was the model driving everything up to the point Blender came along. It was durring this Blender rise, that they also allowed the universities to get the software free.
Around the world schools started teaching Blender in the post Blender 2.5 years. I know this. Because I visited the unis and I talked with the students in the Blender classes and talked with the teachers.
If not for Blender both exposing the market and also giving the opertunity to anyone, the 3D user-base would have been restricted to the privilaged few who could afford school or afford to drop several thousand dollars on a licence of Maya Max or Cinema 4D.
Before Blenderâs rise, there were also schools teaching LightWave.
But I donât think Modo ever made it into universities in a big way. Or schools.
They were trying to repeat the LightWave model of a low cost alternative. But it was already an old model that wasnât going to work because the market was changing.
In a way you can say at least that NewTek must have seen this and decided not to continue to develop LightWave anymore because there would not be a market for it with Blender on the rise.
Autodesk response coded into thier marketing was âeasy access to softewareâ. Decoded: In a new market where you can get software for free, we have to give an appearance of lowering the upfront cost and allow people to rent by the month. Because people are not going to spend 3,000 USD for software anymore upfront. But present it as a low investment option to start right away at a fraction of that and people will buy in.
It worked.
Not only did it keep most people on board, it also atracted new users who would have otherwise went to Blender.
That it also lost users who went to Blender out of disgust, was a loss they had figured in. They knew this would happen. But they didnât have a choice.
Modo died simply because it was trying to hang on to an old business model with a software that lost its development focus.
Modo died because it is not Autodesk. It does not have a strong infuence in Universities with the ability to generate new generations of users.
Blender is succeeding for two main reasons. First it was always cappable of getting results end to end. And for this reason, it had a strong growing grass-roots uerbase. Seccond, they kept improving it and attracting a wider more professional base.
Blender has litterally made its own way. It has carved out its own market and even driven the software market at large. Not the other way aroound.
This basically sums up the response from Ton Rosendall when asked: âWhen will Blender become industry standard? â
He responded that Blender will not come towards the industry but the industry should come to Blender.
In other words Blender will not bend over to become industry standard tool. Blender is making its own way.
â-
What I only sort of regret is spending so much money on Blender addons to get certain jobs done that I might have just spent that money on Houdini Indie and start from there.
Because vanilla Blender which is making itâs own way just takes longer time to mature.
I am still grateful for Blender being free because it opened up the way for me toward other 3D tools and 3D world in general.
In context of the discussion about Modo, I donât know if I could say Houdini is an answer to this âproblemâ either.
It took side fx a long time just to grasp what the idie market actually is and what it wants.
Autodesk as well.
I am not sure what the current restrictions are for Indie, but there used to be rendering res restrictions and maybe something else I am forgetting.
Modo as well, I got into heated debates in the Modo Indie forum as well about this concept.
Finally, what is it now, almost 8 years after Maya LT, a couple of years ago Autodesk finally released Maya Indie but only in restricted territories.
It took that long just to get it through their thick skulls that an indie user is not a user that has less money and also can accept less features, but a user who needs all the features and did not grow up in a first world economy with rich parents.
So they entirely and utterly missed the point.
Meanwhile Substance and many other apps got it right out of the gate.
So Modo, trying desperately to hold its own, failed.
Blender is the app that created a new business model in the 3D market.
The two are things you need to survive this market are:
A strong grassroots user base and/or entrenchment in the industry.
Flexible pricing so that all users worldwide can access the software without strings attached.
Blender is weak on industry entrenchment but stronger in grass roots user base that keeps growing.
Autodesk has a limited grass roots through free student software. But strong industry entrenchment.
Which brings me to what Ton said.
I think that is true to an extent.
But what I see in the long run is that there is a factor of a new generation of users that has not been appreciated fully.
A new generation of studios that will grow up with Blender as a tool to create intellectual property without the need to use Maya.
Over time the grass roots of Blender and the new industry of innovative users it spawns and companies that come into existence as a result will become the new norm.
The current generation will literally die off. And the university-driven user base will be replaced or overpowered by masses of artists worldwide who have been empowered by true easy access to powerful software capable of creating stories and experiences just as viable as those created by much more expensive software and privileged users.
The cost of Houdini is just far too prohibitive to compete with that new Model over time.
It survives on industry entrenchment and the only place to go for off the shelf best FX.
But even they are seeing the writing in the wall and developing at a fast pace to offer an end to end animation package.
Eventually there will come a time where those effects are just coded only in house. Many of the best FX already are.
And there will come a time that Blender users will simply narrow the gap there as well as high quality FX becomes less of an exception and more of the norm.
I support your point, except for a few things here.
Surprisingly, it could be. Not by default, though. There is a Modeler addon which people swear by now how great itâs for direct modelling. It provides the best modeling practices from such softwares like Lightwave, Modo, Blender, Maya. All the best practices encapsulated in one addon within a very powerful DCC.
Some people might really want to look at this Houdini + Modeler combo for all their direct modeling needs if they canât stand Blender.
Pretty much no restrictions for indies and the price is super affordable. If you earn any money with 3D you can afford it and get the software for the full production cycle. Especially since 20.5 where Coppernicus was released. Some gaps you can efficiently cover with Blender (story boarding/modeling/sculpting), and DaVinci/Fusion(compositing/color grading).
Again, I donât agree here. Itâs not. With indie price, itâs very affordable. Far than any other options, and you get a lot of power in one DCC. There is just so much you can do in Houdini if you can get over the initial steep learning curve.
Speaking of learning. There is also Houdini non-commercial version. You can use it for learning the software without paying anything upfront. I donât remember the restriction but I donât think there are many. If one just want to test the waters, it could be very the best option.
Just a side note. From my experience itâs funny how actually there is a ton of overlap in many concepts how Blender and Houdini structured in principle. Especially since Blender is moving more slowly into âeverything nodesâ concept. Learning one makes it easier to learn the other. Blender is trying to get more powerful with procedural workflows and tools, but Houdini is trying to get more artist friendly with top level nodes and more streamlined workflows which doesnât require you to be a coding expert. Currently, Blender + Houdini is an ultimate combo which allows creating anything with no limitation.
No wounder, there is no market for Modo anymore. Which was apparent at least 5 years ago that Modo wonât make it. Neither will Lightwave.
I was already saying it, but Iâd say this again. The next one out is most likely Cinema 4D. Not tomorrow but maybe in 8-10 years. Because both Blender and Houdini are eating into their market of mograph artists. I would say Blender would capture more Cinema 4D user base who doesnât need to do super complex mograph shots. Because geo nodes opened up a lot of possibilities here and tools and workflows are coming fast to Bledner each version narrowing the gap between what Cinema 4D and Blender can do for the average user.
There was no wounder Maxon was expending its portfolio with Redshift and ZBrush acquisitions so if Cinema 4D is in danger it doesnât tank the company. They didnât want to keep all their eggs in one basket.
But Modo is done for sure and it wonât soar again, ever, as a full DCC package. It was in a âzombieâ like state for a long time now. Itâs a miracle some people stuck with it for so long with all the dwindling development and subscription/licenses abuse.
Not just Blender and H, but recently Unreal is making dents into mograph with their cloners, efectors ⌠When you pair it with how fast it can render 4K stuff from Unreal⌠It is easily good choice for any freelancer.
Interesting perspective. Many good points.
I would only say that indie is still too restrictive when you consider growth.
But this is true with all apps except Blender.
When I made the comment about Houdini being too expensive I am talking about a growing user base that can smoothly and organically transition into a working group. A company that can get through the difficult first growing pains. Unlimited resources of workers and unfettered growth, in the context of the current times we find ourselves in.
Autodesk has this problem too.
You just wonât find Houdini ever at the center of a massive widespread ground support even with indie. At some point the transition to the full version must be made. And files are not shared between versions. Last time I checked. Unless you opt for the one time service to upgrade all of your files to the full version.
You can work the math any way you want to make it appear reasonable. But doesnât work out.
Houdini and Autodesk as well as Modo and LightWave all suffer from the same issue.
You take Blender out of the equation and the industry moves at a snail pace just as it had been going.
But this is not the world we live in.
LightWave has been dead for sometime.
It is not coming back.
Houdini will still be around. But not at the center of a new generation of users driving the future of storytelling.
That will be the province of Blender.
The other apps that survive will keep themselves alive by serving the old guard.
I think we forget that if the industry advanced like it did 20 years ago with several robust DCC options all competing with each other, Blender wouldâve never obtained the critical mass needed for a large core team along with rapid user and small studio growth. I do recall some of the release notes (for the commercial options) back in Blenderâs early days, with few exceptions, they were impressive, and they easily outpaced what Blenderâs release note pages showed (not only in the number of features and enhancements, but also in how complete and polished they were)
It is because of the Autodesk monopoly (with the subsequent crash in DCC development) that Blender became appealing enough to easily survive things like the 2.8 Code Quest wasting a lot of resources on UI decisions, followed by the actual 2.8 release seeing major regressions in undo and somehow turning OpenSubDiv tech. into a major regression for subdivision surfaces. Blender was finally appealing enough to see a major boost in its dev. fund and thereby allowing them to fix these major missteps and turn it into overall growth.
WellâŚ
The fact is that it didnât. And it couldnât. It was not a sustainable model. LightWave already proved that a decade before Blender. When LightWave came, myself and many friends who could not afford 6 figures to get into 3D and compete with ILM, suddenly were in business.
Of course we were not using the same tools as the âbig studiosâ. But we didnât need to. LightWave exposed a need for âcommonâ people to get into 3D. They didnât understand the market was there until they released the product (Toaster) and the polularity of LightWave took off and they had to release it free of the Video Toaster. And the next decade brought a whole new influx of artists and studios that would have never existed.
Factually the existence of LightWave and then Modo and other alternatives (along with advances in computer technoliogy) caused the software industry that was only selling to large studios to become extinct, like the dinasours they created for Jurassic Park!
Nothing stays constant.
And as a result of these new advances and the new worker-class users of this software the prices whent down.
Blender came along. It was inevitable that someone would think of the idea.
And it ushered in a whole new era of users.
And again the natural flow of the market was interrupted. Software companies like Autodesk could not afford to keep buying up technology (XSI) and engage in large development goals. They had to scale it down. I was on the Maya Beta. I can say without voilating my agreement that they were very open about the fact that they had too many diverse and broad development goals. It was not sustainable. Maya slowed down in development. It became more focused and less broad. Again, I can say this without violating that agreement. But I can report it as fact.
While all this is happening, Blender is on the rise. They are releasing Maya LT as a competition to it. They stop developing Softimage. Mudbox and MotionBuilder also slow down. Both of those beta forums were shut down. They started trying to bring those technologies to greater or lesser sucess into Maya.
Meanwhile 2.8 and beyond is released. Blender gets millions donated. Blender expands.
LightWave died. And now Modo.
We could probably agree to dissagree. But this is the cart/horse order of things that I have seen.
Blender 2.8, but before then there was still a lot of skepticism outside of BA on whether Blender would ultimately get anywhere.
This was especially so before Blender 2.60, not only did the BF have a major brain-drain issue (people like Psy-Fi, Jahka, and Brecht being hired away), but it still did not have any killer feature or much of anything that wouldâve made studios clamor for it (no true Ngons, no GI, half-baked SSS, slow editmode, slow viewport, insanely basic selection code, iffy global undo, ectâŚ). In addition, people who came here to make the case for commercial software would be met with aggression, myself included. You do not do that when your software is ahead.
I am not sure what you mean?
Blender is not now ahead. It never was ahead. I donât think ever will be.
I have already said this a zillion times and ways when people were trashing it on the LightWave forums - back in the day.
It does not need to be the leading (best of features) software to have the impact that it has.
All it needs to do is keep growing and attracting users. It is a complete faslhood to say that a software has to be better than all other software to gain users and grow in popularity. Because not all users need the same thing. Not even professionals. Not studios either.
If you believe that, then I guess you believe the only way Blender could get anyhere is if all other software made so many mistakes that Blender was given a pass.
I donât agree with that at all.
I think that is an innaccurate version of history - IMHO.
I agree with Richard here. Also what I think gets lost so much in all of this is how ideally Blender is situated for small studios and teams and independent creators. Basically the Indy market. Blender is very different to the others and a lot of that is due to itâs unique development and how it works as a more or less self contained eco system. It makes it wonderfully straight forward to build smaller scale creator led production pipelines around.
Simply broadly comparing individule features against other apps I think in a spread sheet or promotional video sort of a way can simply be a distortion and a distraction. What is more important very much of the time is how well everything works together and how stable reliable and logical it is. Thatâs why I always wrote Blender just needs to be better at being Blender. It has carved out itâs own niche and has all this time obviously been on a clear path. It does not need to be trying to ape Maya or anything else and nor would this be a good or beneficial strategy.
Blender changed the way I work and what I thought was possible. I know Maya Max and Softimage pipelines but this is different. The way it can pipeline into itself is amazing. Last year I had an entirely Blender produced project premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival, Venice Immersive. It was large scale wrap around immersive projection and an animated and VFX film that was over 30 min long. I worked on it with an established international gallery artist and for over two years it was just the two of us working on it mostly through the pandemic and a large bulk of it was done on an old Mac workstation using Blender 2.79B. Blender was already amazing I think for indy production even back then. I would not have wanted to have done this with anything else.
For independent creatives I donât think there is anything better right now. These are the sorts of projects Blender has made much more possible. Not just because it is open source or can be accessed more easily but because of how it functions and is built and made.
Exactly the reason why you see a hilariously big banner about 2% company. Hooray. 
This is correct.
I have Blender ,Maya
âolderâ C4D(R26)
and Houdini Apprentice.
Once you get past hard surface modeling
And try to create feature film quality animation& VFX
(Smoke & Pryo liquid,cloth simulations)
Blender falls way short of Maya and Houdini.
and please donât start crooning about VFX Blender addons
I have them âallâ 
Flip fluids, Fracture iterator, Ka-fire Ka-boom
VDBlab,Divine cut etc.
Yes you can get very Decent results pushing these addons to their limits but you still do not even come close to matching Mayaâs built in Bifrost & Aero or Ncloth or Xgen hair simulation system
All of these features are in the default ,vanilla seats of Maya that are being taught in the schools
On the Character rigging animation side you truly need Auto Rig Pro, the Faceit face rigging addon
and Tal Herskoâs animation layers addon to even come close
matching the Default built in rigging and body/facial mocap and proper game rig export ability of Maya advanced skeleton and you still hit a performance brick wall with complex rigs due to the lack of cached rig evaluation while animating âŚas we have in Maya.
And I need not even mention how Default Vanilla
Blender compare to Houdini in VFX even with geonodes.
The reality is that whenever I see Videoâs or Forum posts
seriously comparing Blender to Maya it is inevitably coming from hard surface modeling or sculpting enthusiasts
Never from Film/game animators or studio VFX artists.
Rhythm & Hues used a repackaged Blender build for a lot of stuff internally that allowed them to add to their pipeline, and the main users didnât even know it was Blender because of the internal branding. I got that from a friend I worked with that used to work at R&H before the layoffs.
Sean Kennedy did a cool presentation on VFX in Blender as well.
So hey ! Come join the 2 percent if you have not already. 
