Works great. Export as LWO (with edges not welded), import to Modo, run Pack UVs and you are nearly done...

jonah

Good news:),

Just one Q, why not weld the edges?, maybe an obvious answer:/

If you weld, then Modo recognizes the whole mesh as one surface. So double-clicking will select the whole mesh. But if you want to have ability to select each surface more easily you should export unwelded. It will make UV layout much easier. Then later in modo you can run Vertex > Merge at distance of zero units. And that will effectively weld the edges, but won't damage the UVs...

jonah

Hi olio,

Modo is quite limited for any animations job. 401 preview don't show any progress in that area.

I didn't use modo for any uv's job (I prefer to use uvlayout). As for the meshing, n-gones are quite ok, there are some
normals to realign sometimes, but that's not a big deal.

I've had no problems with the mesh in modo (except for flipped normals), either exporting as a single surface and making my own UVs or using the ones that come in from MoI.

Modo's renderer does a nice job with modo meshes IMHO. I believe the normals issues are all addressed now and should be in the next MoI beta. Plus there will be a command in MoI to flip surface normals before export, if necessary.

As for animation - I don't do it myself. My understanding is that everything in modo is time bound so can be animated via a timeline and keyframes. But you won't find rigging and CA tools, NLA, etc. at the moment (unless the reveals for 401 spring a big surprise :-) )

Yes, Modo really looks like a fine piece of software, it has a tight community, cross-platform.

I don't need CA animation, what I need are flythroughs and simple rotations of objects, e.g. closing a door. But and important thing is it is flicker free.
the Modo renderer looks first class (correct me if wrong), I really like the concept of the shader tree.

thanks for all the tips,

jbshorty, I was reading about Modo on the Rhino forum, and saw that you have also used Brazil, how to compare the render engine in modo to brazil? thanks for any info, and sorry for the OT.

Hi olio. They both have their advantages/disadvantages. I'll try to make a brief list about it

Modo:
- speed, both for setup and render time. But beware as you push modo further towards quality (and further away from the default settings) it will slow down greatly
- easy shader system, but will actually become a problem on complex materials
- interactive preview render makes light/material setup very easy
- has some lighting artifact problems when using blurry reflections
- excellent render pass system
- good and fast displacement
- does not produce accurate color match to the system color picker, unless you make adjustments to gamma and also calculate the hue difference to get your correct output color. Its a pain in the ass if you need to accurately match Pantone standards. I've not heard of any improvements to this in 401.
- many reports of poor network rendering implements
- many complaints of banded images on interior GI renders
- lack of "per object" and "per material" inclusion and exclusion lists
- lack of good procedural textures

Brazil:
- nodal shading system, complicated but extremely powerful. You can use any shader or texture to drive the effect of any channel in the engine.
- accessible control of any single parameter in the engine. Once you learn Brazil then all other engines look like kiddie toys. This can also be a negative for new users, but the UI can be rolled up into a "simple" mode to make setup extremely easy
- excellent antialiasing routines and controls, extremely important for CAD models. I know that modo 401 will improve this area, but I've not seen the results of it yet. In my experience, modo (201-302) failed horribly in this area. A couple of weeks ago someone also posted a comparison of AA in Brazil vs. Vray and Brazil was the clear winner
- excellent routines and controls for render cache
- shadow mapping
- photon mapping
- artificial lighting and shading effects
- not as fast as Modo, but less true as modo approaches same quality
- no network rendering yet, but it's in discussions now. Also it is reportedly the first engine actually running on the Caustic One raytracing card. : ) !!!
- takes advantage of all Rhino RDK features such as edge softening, shut lining, curve piping,
geometric displacement, etc (micro-poly displacement will be coming soon)
- no fiber/hair/grass generation
- no advance animation (rhino shortcoming)
- you don't have to leave Rhino
- can easily add occlusion effects to "ground" objects so it's very east to avoid "floaters" when undersampling the render cache. Also this is very good for enhancing geometric detail in your models

It's hard to recommend one or the other, as your needs may not be the same as mine. But I stay in Rhino whenever possible as it makes my project time much shorter. But I'm mostly doing product shots. If you need to do something more than that, I would recommend modo as a good choice. It is very easy and fast to get nice results. And when it behaves it actually makes rendering a pretty fun experience

jonah

Thank you so much for the list Jonah,

What I like about the modo render is of course the render preview, and with the 401 it is going to be great!, whenever I go back to traditional rendering in my case with Vray for Rhino, I feel I never now what I am doing until I hit the render button:).

Also I feel the UI in Modo is much better with additional areas of the software, while in Rhino when I work with materials or render settings they feel so much out of place, windows everywhere and just so much clutter. I think Rhino was not made for rendering or animation (bongo) and they have not changed their UI to accommodate this.

So how is you general workflow? Model in Rhino, mesh in moi and UV and Render in Modo?

< A couple of weeks ago someone also posted a comparison of AA in Brazil vs. Vray and Brazil was the clear winner
Have you the address of that?

I wouldn't compare the UI/workflow of Vray to Brazil. Even one of the guys from Vray admits they need a UI overhaul, while the Brazil UI is nearly identical to that of Brazil for Max. That could be good or bad, dependending on your point of view ; ) Modo's UI really is something on a higher level, being able to configure however you choose to. Definitely a cool feature, but overall not very important to the resulting image.

My workflow is normally to stay in Rhino as much as possible. It's gotten much more practical now that I started using Clement Grainer's mesh unwrap plugin. If I need more advanced UV tools then yes I will mesh the objects (sometimes in Moi, sometimes in Rhino) and send to modo, then return to Rhino again.

Also I just started using Fry and DAMN the results are so good. Will be amazing if modo finally opens up an SDK so Fry can plugin to modo. Imagine setting up in modo, click render and start Frying! : )

I'm travelling now just using my phone so I can't really copy/paste links. But the comparison was done by Paul Sherstobitof to compare the results at filleted edges. Vray had sharp blocky shading at a G1 edge, while Brazil transitioned it nice & smooth. I think it was about 2-3 weeks ago. This may not be indicative of all AA situations, but it's a very important one for product shots

How are the render times with Fry render?, is fry or maxwell a viable (usable) option for the casual render guy:), who don't have an render farm to support him?

I have a dual-quad so Fry is not bad. Actually gets pretty clean images in about 10-20 minutes. And the "light-layer blending" is so awesome, combined with very fast setup times. You don't need to worry about setting up antialiasing, sampling, caustics, etc. It's automatically done for you just as in reality. But on my wife's Macbook Pro (2-cores) obviously the render speed becomes an issue (then it's about 3x-4x slower than my desktop system). Unbiased engines are great tool to have. But not so well suited as the everyday workhorse engine. So it's good to have an engine like Vray or Modo to handle quick daily work.

Thanks Jonah for your advice!

Jonah, where can one find this uv unwrap plugin for rhino

It is on this page in the Rhino wiki:

http://en.wiki.mcneel.com/default.aspx/McNeel/UVcWrap.html

This works on meshes and nurbs, but when you input a nurbs object, it will just extract the render mesh into a new object, then hide the nurbs object, then unwrap the mesh. By default, Rhino polysurfaces have packed UV coordinates already... Clement's instructions are pretty clear about how to use it properly. As he mentioned, it was built using scripts so it has limitations. And McNeel is already starting to work on a true Nurbs unwrapper and UV editor. But Nurbs unwrapping probably won't have any benefit except to those people rendering Nurbs objects directly in Rhino...

jonah