Modo version available now for the hobby user market

2

Comments

  • KatteyKattey Posts: 2,899
    edited December 1969

    Latest rumor has Modo for Steam starting at $159. As far as Steam downloads go, it is possible to create a shortcut directly to your app in the Steam directory in your Program Files and launch it without going through the Steam console. I've done that a few times, but of course, ymmv.

    If you uninstall Steam can you still use this Modo? I once uninstalled Steam and it also wiped out all my games and saves, even 'Bastion' which does work without Steam by itself as a rare exception.
  • MattymanxMattymanx Posts: 6,898
    edited December 1969

    Kattey said:
    Latest rumor has Modo for Steam starting at $159. As far as Steam downloads go, it is possible to create a shortcut directly to your app in the Steam directory in your Program Files and launch it without going through the Steam console. I've done that a few times, but of course, ymmv.

    If you uninstall Steam can you still use this Modo? I once uninstalled Steam and it also wiped out all my games and saves, even 'Bastion' which does work without Steam by itself as a rare exception.


    Steam can run in an offline mode but all games and programs bought through steam will launch steam before the program.

  • MasterstrokeMasterstroke Posts: 1,926
    edited December 1969

    Bummer Modo is so tempting, but no way. Cloud software is a absolutly NO GO . If all programs are all cloud programs, I will stop using computers. I might do gardening instead.

  • KatteyKattey Posts: 2,899
    edited December 1969

    Mattymanx said:
    Kattey said:
    Latest rumor has Modo for Steam starting at $159. As far as Steam downloads go, it is possible to create a shortcut directly to your app in the Steam directory in your Program Files and launch it without going through the Steam console. I've done that a few times, but of course, ymmv.

    If you uninstall Steam can you still use this Modo? I once uninstalled Steam and it also wiped out all my games and saves, even 'Bastion' which does work without Steam by itself as a rare exception.


    Steam can run in an offline mode but all games and programs bought through steam will launch steam before the program.
    'Bastion' was launcheable without Steam if you go to folder and execute the program, but this is so far the only program I discovered that could do that.
    Oh well. If this is on Steam, I won't buy this software. As I said, games are ok risk, but tools aren't.

  • daveleitzdaveleitz Posts: 459
    edited December 1969

    Kattey said:
    Latest rumor has Modo for Steam starting at $159. As far as Steam downloads go, it is possible to create a shortcut directly to your app in the Steam directory in your Program Files and launch it without going through the Steam console. I've done that a few times, but of course, ymmv.

    If you uninstall Steam can you still use this Modo? I once uninstalled Steam and it also wiped out all my games and saves, even 'Bastion' which does work without Steam by itself as a rare exception.

    Bastion. Great little game! I did the same thing, running it directly. Considering that Steam downloads are all contained within a subdirectory of Steam in Program Files, it would be reasonable that everything gets uninstalled when uninstalling the main program. Programs aren't usually installed to user directories like content is with DAZ products.

    Whenever possible, I do like to purchase DVDs instead of downloads, like my recent purchase of Corel Painter through Amazon. Thing is, with Modo there is just no way to get the full version outside of Steam without plunking down almost 10 times the amount of cash. I guess, if it's not a 'must have' program for its feature set, then there are other good programs out there that cost less and don't tie one to an unwanted service.

  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 40,937
    edited December 1969

    ...Modo would still be my first choice. Blender's UI is a battle in and of itself and one I personally don't care to heap on top of the leaning curve for modelling and sculpting.

    If 159$ is the true price, then the Steam version is tempting and in a way could work as an interim learning solution until I can afford the full standalone version from The Foundry. It would be better than having nothing while trying to save up the Zloty's.

    Strata 3D is still a a very likely option as well, though it does not have sculpting (yet).

  • RAMWolffRAMWolff Posts: 10,157
    edited December 1969

    Yea, sculpting tools would make Strata more full featured, esp in today's product expectations, for those that really like to add in allot of detail without having to switch over to ZBrush to get that and if you don't have ZBrush then your SOL!

  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 40,937
    edited December 1969

    ...at nearly 700$, Zbrush won't be in my toolbox any time soon.


    ...unless I win the lotto, but then, I will be able to afford Modo at full price

  • Fixme12Fixme12 Posts: 589
    edited December 2013

    Kyoto Kid said:
    dhtapp said:
    Well, this is interesting news.

    Brad Peebler (formerly CEO of Luxology, now I think President of The Foundry's MODO Division), usually does a fun weekly modcast on Friday afternoons. I'll be watching for it today.

    I got into modo 102 years ago thanks to a special sale run here at the DAZ site. Followed their upgrade path all the way to the current version.

    It's a big, BIG program, just like Photoshop. So many features built in, most of which I don't touch. But I absolutely love the app. One of the most elegant and well-thought-out architectures I've ever seen. Everything that should work together, does work together, sometimes in ways the developers didn't even think to test.


    ...I "test drove" Modo301 years ago and liked what I saw. Unfortunately even back then the price (899$) was more than daunting. Now it's 1,495$ which most definitely puts it out of reach. That;s about what it cost to build my workstation and that took about 18 months of scraping and saving on a better income than I have now.

    One of my biggest concerns is having to run Steam in background along with an application that requires a minimum of 2G of memory. Another is that it sounds like the Steam version might be optimised more for game development rather than full on studio based 3D work.

    Based on the pricing differential for Silo2.2 between Steam and Nevercenter's price, I don't see Modo being offered for 99$. unless there are major limitations imposed. I see a pricetag more in the area of 500 - 600$ and that even that may be a low ball figure considering purchasing SIlo though Steam, works out to a 38% savings compared to Nevercenter's price.


    Just learned about another pro grade modelling application, Strata 3D (which has now been released for Windows) which retails for less than the full list price of Carrara 8.5 Pro and is supposedly very intuitive as well. I need to investigate this more.

    Watch out this month the foundry modo site for price drops 40% price drops for 701.
    they did this previous year, may be this month or in january as 801 was expected around march/april.

    that's the best time to jump on

    also remember, that you need a good workstation to run this kind of software well (for rendering)
    if you really would love to play with 3d, you need a good fast system 2*CPU power, GPU power,...
    else just stop dreaming and stay with what you have and enjoy life. sounds hard, but that's the best way.

    Post edited by Fixme12 on
  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 40,937
    edited December 2013

    ...i7 2.8 gHz, 12G (expandable to 24) DDR3 memory in tri channel mode, GPU with 1G GDDR5 OGL 4.3, 1 x 1TB & 1 x 250GB HDD WIn7 64 bit.


    I think that would be sufficient.


    Primarily will be using the Sculpting/Modelling tools. Rigging, surfacing, and rendering will mostly be done in Daz. Studio and Carrara.


    Hexagon's instability just gets in the way of getting things done. Not good when you spend almost half your time recovering lost work every time it crashes or freezes up.

    Blender's incomprehensible UI is just too much to deal with on top of the learning curve for modelling and sculpting

    Post edited by kyoto kid on
  • Fixme12Fixme12 Posts: 589
    edited December 1969

    Kyoto Kid said:
    ...i7 2.8 gHz, 12G (expandable to 24) DDR3 memory in tri channel mode, GPU with 1G GDDR5 OGL 4.3, 1 x 1TB & 1 x 250GB HDD WIn7 64 bit.


    I think that would be sufficient.


    Primarily will be using the Sculpting/Modelling tools. Rigging, surfacing, and rendering will mostly be done in Daz. Studio and Carrara.


    Hexagon's instability just gets in the way of getting things done. Not good when you spend almost half your time recovering lost work every time it crashes or freezes up.

    Blender's incomprehensible UI is just too much to deal with on top of the learning curve for modelling and sculpting

    for the rendering such kind of system is to slow, believe me (or you need to wait lot's of hours for one render)
    got I7 with 16gig, 2gb gpu and was to slow for me. 've worked with carrara, hex, bryce
    to bad, 'm all done with above tools, only would give studio a possible chance if they can make it real & fixed in studio 5.
    but that's another story :)

  • RAMWolffRAMWolff Posts: 10,157
    edited December 1969

    Yup. Good system you got there.

    I agree about Hexagon. I'm not sure why DAZ just can't get it's act together and do a really solid update for Hexagon. None of us would have to look any further then for a good basic modeling program. Makes no sense for them to acquire it and then do nothing with it. I guess their push is Carrara but I have no interest in that program in the least. Just really irks me to no end seeing Hex just sitting there all buggy and old and moldy. Truly a waste.

  • frank0314frank0314 Posts: 13,918
    edited December 1969

    I've been sitting on my modeling app with no updates for 6 years so I know exactly how you feel.

  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 40,937
    edited December 2013

    fixme12 said:
    for the rendering such kind of system is to slow, believe me (or you need to wait lot's of hours for one render)
    got I7 with 16gig, 2gb gpu and was to slow for me. 've worked with carrara, hex, bryce
    to bad, 'm all done with above tools, only would give studio a possible chance if they can make it real & fixed in studio 5.
    but that's another story :)


    ...Lux is slow too, (sometimes days not just hours). Heck, even 3Delight can take hours on a good system depending on what elements are in the scene.

    The only way to significantly speed up the rendering process would be to drop about 20$K into a fully decked out Mac Pro with Dual hyperthreading Xeon hexacore CPUs 64 G memory, and dual Quadro K5000s.

    ...or a couple million on a Cray.

    Again, rendering is not what interests me as much as the modelling and sculpting tools as well as the fact Modo being stable and having a nice UI.

    Post edited by kyoto kid on
  • MattymanxMattymanx Posts: 6,898
    edited December 1969

    Kyoto Kid said:
    3Delight can take hours on a good system depending on what elements are in the scene.

    You have to remember, 3Delight is a professional render engine that was not really meant to run of the average home computer. Its designed to be powered by render farms. We are greatly blessed to have access to it but the average home computer can only do what it can. There are many factors too that can go into the rendering times of any render so we all need to learn what we can to help reduce the load where we can.

  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 40,937
    edited December 1969

    ...well for me, two of them are the Advanced Ambient and Advanced Spot Lights. They render so much faster than UE and give superb results. Recently competed a rendering a large scene with a lot of reflectivity, nine characters (Gen4 and Genesis), and SSS in about 24 - 26 minutes.

    Would have probably taken more than a day with UE.

  • Three WishesThree Wishes Posts: 471
    edited December 2013

    fixme12 said:

    for the rendering such kind of system is to slow, believe me (or you need to wait lot's of hours for one render)
    got I7 with 16gig, 2gb gpu and was to slow for me. 've worked with carrara, hex, bryce
    to bad, 'm all done with above tools, only would give studio a possible chance if they can make it real & fixed in studio 5.
    but that's another story :)

    One of the nice things about MODO's standalone version (although I'd be surprised if the Steam package has a way to do it) is that you get render farming for free.

    The feature's been problematic during the last couple of MODO releases, so The Foundry attached an external team of devs to the MODO core team to get some fresh eyes on it, and the last Service Pack came through with flying colors.

    MODO 701 is licensed to the customer, not to the machine. That means I can roll into a remote office, download MODO on a workstation, and crank away. What I can't do is run 2 instances of the modeler at once with the UI active on both.

    However, I can install and start the app on multiple machines, which I do at home. They see each other across the network, compare license settings, and then every instance except the first one started drops into render farm mode and waits to help the master instance out on a scene.

    You'll see a little lag on scenes that have GI enabled with irradiance caching, since only the master instance preps the cache. But once the main render pass cuts in and the scene info has been shared, having even a single relatively puny secondary machine like I do can dramatically cut down on render time.

    I can't remember exactly what the farm limit is...I want to say it's 50 cores total, but they may have tweaked that. Since there's a Linux version of MODO available, I can see a dedicated artist stacking a couple of relatively cheap Linux boxes in the closet and going to town. I'm still hoping to get a new high-end iMac (32gig RAM, quad-i7) early next year and can't wait to demote my 16gig Windows machine to farm work.

    BTW, as I'm sure other renderers have as well, Luxology has completely solved the traditional bane of render farms: The slightly patchy results in the scene when scene strips that were rendered by different graphics hardware are stitched together by the master. I run a mix of Radeon and NVidia and the scene color space on a distributed render is flawless.

    Edit: Also worth noting, MODO is license-once, run everywhere. You have full access to download a fresh copy for PC, Mac, or Linux as many times as you need it. They just ask that you not be a goober and leave copies floating around if you do spend a session as a guest on someone else's workstation.

    Post edited by Three Wishes on
  • Coon RaCoon Ra Posts: 200
    edited December 1969

    "Save 40% on MODO until 8am (UTC) Christmas Eve"
    The Foundry announced on their website. Upgrade costs $297.00 for individual license.

  • bighbigh Posts: 8,147
    edited December 1969

    Coon Ra said:
    "Save 40% on MODO until 8am (UTC) Christmas Eve"
    The Foundry announced on their website. Upgrade costs $297.00 for individual license.

    now where is that $900
    mmmmmmmmmmm
    can't find it
    got to be some where
    one of you guys got my money :roll:

  • Mr Gneiss GuyMr Gneiss Guy Posts: 462
    edited December 1969

    I'm assuming this will be some game optimized subset? That's the impression I got when I looked at the information they had out last week. I wonder how useful, if at all, it would be to people doing anything other than games? Have they clarified?

  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 40,937
    edited December 2013

    ...that is my concern as well.

    I am not involved with game development, heck I'm not even interested in online or console gaming as it pretty much tends to have relatively the same format, shoot or whack something to gain experience points so one's character can advance in levels. There is no real interaction between characters as there is in table top P&P RPGs other than beating each other up in PvP mode or defeating the virtual player.

    ...not very imaginative.

    That said, I primarily am looking for a good stable polygon modelling programme which also has 3D sculpting as well as ongoing support and development. If the Steam version i just set up to create decimated meshes for game development, then it would be of little use for my needs.


    The part I like about Modo is it that the licence is not "seat" or workstation based like most other softwares. I imagine one could, if they so desired, use it with a render farm service as well.

    As to the December sale, 897$ is still way out of my budget (that's about what Modo 301 cost years ago and I couldn't afford it then).

    Post edited by kyoto kid on
  • Midnight_storiesMidnight_stories Posts: 4,112
    edited December 1969

    I grabbed the update from 601 to 701 over $200 in savings plus it comes with the substance designer plugin.

  • daveleitzdaveleitz Posts: 459
    edited December 1969

    If Modo for Steam has the ability to import and export .OBJ at the very least, then that would pretty much make it compatible with DS for use as a modeling program. But if it is restricted to formats that will only work with the Source Engine, then that would probably turn away many potential buyers here, including myself.

  • MiloMilo Posts: 511
    edited December 1969

    I guess it will depend on what subset of features it has. On another note if you get steam they have a product on there called Source Filmmaker which looks fairly cool.. I Grabbed it sometime back but haven't had the time to work with it, but its a real time animation film software.

  • ncampncamp Posts: 345
    edited December 1969

    Just checked the steam store. It said the product (Modo) would unlock in one hour. Then we can see the pricing.

    ncamp

  • Coon RaCoon Ra Posts: 200
    edited December 1969

    Judging by pictures only modeling abilities left - model, paint, topo and uv. Kind of extended modo 103.

  • daveleitzdaveleitz Posts: 459
    edited December 1969

    Introductory price: $120

    Now I just have to find out if it can import and export .obj format.

  • Three WishesThree Wishes Posts: 471
    edited December 1969

    Introductory price: $120

    Now I just have to find out if it can import and export .obj format.

    All I'm seeing so far: DOTA 2 and FBX

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 99,429
    edited December 1969

    Yes, the comments from the Foundry on the modo forum ddi indicate that export options are limited. Also, it's non-commercial though I'm not quite sure how that works with making content for DoTA 2.

  • ncampncamp Posts: 345
    edited December 1969

    Yes, the comments from the Foundry on the modo forum ddi indicate that export options are limited. Also, it's non-commercial though I'm not quite sure how that works with making content for DoTA 2.

    One thing I saw on another site said it was non for commercial use except for DoTA 2 sales.

    ncamp

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