Hello all,

I have a fairly general question to all Modo wizards present here.

I'm still fairly new to general art of 3D and, while I have been playing with MoI for quite some time, my knowledge of modo is pretty much zero.

I've built my starship model in MoI. I painted, textured, etc it in modo and I'm happy with results.

Now I want to damage it. Heavily.

Obviously, small stuff, nicks and scratches, would be displacement/bump.
Obviously, all the major stuff, like interior of blown out sections, can be modelled in moi, brought in and used as any other model.

My problem lies in the medium sized stuff like impact craters that, in modo, seem to be the domain of sculpting.
Looking at it from one side, sculpting promises just what I would like, ability to add arbitrary complexity to arbitrary points on a mesh.
On the other side, it seems to require heavy mesh subdivision, which does not bode well for already dense model imported from moi.
From a MoI angle, the problem looks very hard, while I can imagine a process to create an "ideal" impact crater, it still would be far too "clean" and labour-intensive compared to the effects of few seconds' worth of work with modo's sculpt brush.

Any pointers?

P.S. Is there a way to programmatically add points along a curve in MoI? I'd like to write a script that would take a profile curve, add a bunch of points to them then apply some noise to them to make a nice looking "tear line" for slicing my model with to create debris and holes.

Thanks!

Hi Jacob, someone with more Modo experience may be able to give you some more specific advice, but I'll try to give a bit here.

For sculpting, you may want to get a kind of more evenly diced up mesh result so that there are plenty of vertices to deform. Normally the mesh output has fewer vertices in areas that are flatter and more in areas that are curvy. But if you want to manipulate vertices in some flat area then you'll want more of them.

You can use the "Divide larger than" option at export time from MoI to help dice up everything into smaller polygon pieces. See here for some examples:

http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=804.26
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2833.5


> P.S. Is there a way to programmatically add points along
> a curve in MoI? I'd like to write a script that would take a
> profile curve, add a bunch of points to them then apply some
> noise to them <...>

Try the Rebuild command for getting a bunch of points along a curve:
http://moi3d.com/2.0/docs/moi_command_reference10.htm#rebuild

But there is not currently any way for a script to access the individual control points of a curve, so without that it's not really possible to make a script to jiggle them around right now.

- Michael

Your best bet is not to try and sculpt the mesh directly. Create an EXR vector displacement map and sculpt using that. The micro poly displacement at render should take care of the underlying mesh displacement and shouldn't have any trouble if you have an even mesh as Michael suggested. The advantage of using an image is that you could re-import your MoI model (if you make some changes), and reapply the displacement very quickly. However, you need to UV map the mesh before you can use image based sculpting. Vector displacement maps allow not just height data but side to side as well so you can sculpt cavities and overhangs. Modo 501 also has multi res sculpting but the base mesh must be Catmull-Clarke subdivided before you start, so it won't play well with a MOI mesh.

The time consuming bit is UVing the mesh, but if you use the Atlas option with the UV projection tool, it should be good enough and is very quick. If you get problems with seams, you might have to take a different approach.

Here is a quick example. This is a glass bottle modeled in MOI. The first image is with the vector displacement map and the second is without it.

Thank you for your tips, this helps a lot!

I'll try to post results soon :-)