Well at least it's a good deal.

For modo vs blender, it's really hard to compare.
You need to find someone that really master Modo and Blender to have an unbiased comparaison.

As far as I know Blender still can't manage vertex normals info right, something really important when using objects from MoI.

You should try yourself (there is a 30 days demo available) and see if modo works for you.

I own both, which isn't very difficult when one is free ;-)
I am a Modo user from 101, and always upgraded to the latest version.
I like Modo a lot, it has a great community. The only thing i 'hate' about Modo is the lack of cool plugins.
No Vray support or a proper fracture tools to name a few (Blender has both).
Both have their strengths and weaknesses. When money is no issue, i would make use of the offer BUT don't be lured towards a tool because of a huge discount. If you can do all your stuff in Blender...why change?
Cheap (or free) doesn't mean it's worse ;-) 3dMax is much morre expenseive then Lightwave, yet i would pick the later any time.

Discounts come and go (although 40% is cheap(ish))

Usually when there is a big (suspicies) discount you can expect two things:

software company will be acquired by a bigger one;
new version will come;

I have never seen such a discount at modo; that's why I vote for the first one otherwise we are still in eco crisis.

But I can suggest a better thing: for 550 you could buy a better computer with a GT 670Ti for cycle render

I felt these same feeling you want to buy an original and professional software that is valuable for a reasonable price after you can talk to yourself that you are a very CG professional because you spent a lot of money for a software. You will be the same good professional if you use Blender that is also same and professional however extra cheap. and? Buy If you think you will be more productive with modo.

You could also spend that money on other programs that might be a better complement to Blender like ZBrush or 3D-Coat.

Is Modo 601 more suited for product design than Blender? I am thinking about precision and compatibility with CAD soft wares and 3D printing.

As PaQ mentioned, Blender does not support vertex normal on import.

This is a major pain while importing MoI objects and can reduce productivity in many ways.
Cylinders are good objects to test vertex normals.

It's sad that this hasn't been addressed, blender is good in multiple aspects.

Marc

Hi Marc,

There is an Blender plugin for Moi as far as I know.
Otherwise Blender organize Normals very well from menu.

(2 min :) not 720$)

Hi Andras,

I think your suspicious about the discount is wrong.

- Luxology just merge with The Foundry (Nuke, Mari), so there is really no chance the both companies will be acquired by anyone soon.
- 601 was released in end feb 2011 if I remember right ... You probably can count on 1 year cycle for 701.

Finally the vertex normal problem when importing in Blender is still there. Reordering the normals inside blender dont help.
I have heard about the plugin (using .lwo right ?), but it doesnt really help, as soon you render the model, original normals are deleted and replaced with an average smoothing one.

It's really a big limitation, that makes blender a really bad choice for rendering MoI geometry.

The plug-in for Blender is for an older version, if I remember right there was a major change in the plug-in interface in Blender 2.5 and the older LWO import plug-in that Anthony wrote that would bring in vertex normals does not work anymore with the new plug-in interface. And as mentioned above, getting imports to work with vertex normals is only part of the problem - Blender does not use the model's actual current vertex normals when it does a render, it throws them out and calculates a new set just from the polygon data. It will also throw them out if you go into edit mode even if you do not do any operation that would actually invalidate them (like just editing UVs for example).

So Blender has problems with vertex normals handling on multiple levels. Anthony did make a custom version of Blender that had all these things disabled - but it is again an old version and his patch was not accepted into the Blender main version. You can find this customized old version here: http://home.comcast.net/~chronosphere/true-normals.htm

There is a detailed previous discussion about this on the forum here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4272.1

This is a major problem with Blender that makes it difficult to use CAD-generated data (basically from any CAD program also including MoI) with Blender.

If you are doing only polygon modeling it's not such a big problem since the vertex normals in that case are usually already coming from the polygon data in the first place. It's when you want to use CAD data where the vertex normals are coming from the original CAD data and creating them from the polygons only does not work very well that it causes problems.

- Michael

I have no problems using Moi Models in Blender. And i use it often.
i only have to use the "Edge Split" Modifier to correct the smoothing.
thats all.
Or do you mean something else?
Try the Edgesplit modifier!

Hi BlackBird - the Edgesplit modifier doesn't fully solve the problem, although it does generally help with polygon-based vertex normals generation if all the polygons are roughly the same size and if you don't have things like one big planar polygon next to a small sized one like you often do with CAD models. So another thing that helps reduce the artifacts somewhat is if you dice the output from MoI up into more evenly sized pieces using the "Divide larger than" option at export time from MoI.

But these all only generally reduce the shading artifacts that you will get to be smaller, they will still be there and usually still be very noticeable if your model is brightly lit like in a studio product shot or something like that, especially if there are any shiny reflective surfaces involved.

So it does depend a little bit on what particular kind of renderings you're doing - if you're doing stuff that is kind of darker, highly textured to be sort of dirty looking already, then yeah it's possible that these Blender problems might not be such of an issue. With that style of rendering it will be difficult to see the shading glitches. But a lot of times people using CAD want more of that kind of brightly lit studio type shot and these vertex normal problems in Blender are terrible for those kinds of shots.

As far as I know, Blender is the only rendering program out there that just totally ignores vertex normals that are in OBJ files, every other rendering system that I know of is able to load and use them if they are in the file... So if you want a render that has crisp and accurate looking shading it is better to use a different renderer.

- Michael