Foundry has announced it will discontinue development of Modo, its 3D modeling tool, following the release of Modo 17.1 later this year. According to the press release, this it to concentrate on its core software offerings and develop new tools for the media and entertainment industry.
Current customers will continue receiving support for the duration of their contracts and can apply for a 10-year extended license to maintain access to Modo beyond the official support period. Foundry will not issue further feature or maintenance updates, and compatibility with future operating system updates cannot be guaranteed.
Modo’s downloads, documentation, and support resources will remain accessible until November 2025, with forums available until December 2024. Customers seeking license transfers or additional support can contact Foundry directly.
For further details, visit Foundry’s website.
Believe me, the features of this program were more than Max. Max still doesn’t have a dynamic section for fabric population. In my opinion, you should have invested in the Nuke section first. Your Katana program is out of order, just like this program. Do you insist on the Nuke section if In the next 5/2 part, you would spend a lot of time on your work schedule
I hope a company like unreal buy modo and vue and integrate them to their product line
They have the unreal game engine and rendering software but missing a 3d modelling and landscape generation software buying Modo and Vue fix that problem.
You cannot plug software into another one as easily as people think.
They better hire the modo key devs and ask them to work on the modeling part of UE following UE codebase and using their skill to create a brand-new code.
This is some sad news. I really enjoy MODO.
Has been a long time coming. I’m a bit surprised they kept it that long. Still sad to see. Modo had made good progress when what-was-his-name was still around pushing it.
Very sad news 😔
A death in the family
Rhino3d
I never used Modo, but coming from Lightwave way back when, I appreciated its legacy and the people behind it. It’s a quiet end to an era that helped shape the cg industry we have today.
The gradient deformation of this software amazed me from the beginning, I haven’t seen it in another program, but I could never learn it. Same as mental ray, I watched all the tutorials and couldn’t.
Mental ray was one of the most powerful renderers and still probably has some of the best shader control, being stuck on final gather killed it not to mention the competition.
Good times, you needed real technical knowledge to get even the basics working, nowadays its just drag and drop and you’ll get what we used to work three days with weeks of troubleshooting before that, to find the perfect settings in MR.
Ironically enough even with all the powerful tools of today the amount of crap and sub par quality produced by the majority compared to the artwork done before is baffling, just goes to show no amount of easy access tech and resources can beat good old fashion hard earned skill and talent.
Ahh yes, good old Mental Ray. Feels like a mystical relic of the dark ages of technology now a days A treasure trove of mystical powers hidden within it’s core, for those who dared venture into it’s depths.
Once I switched to Redshift, mr felt more like a mental delay.
Everything has an end.
I feel like I am becoming that grandpa who always complains about “things were better in the old days!”
Just like those ladies from the golden Hollywood era of actresses, cant buy class today even if you throw unlimited money at it.
Hahaha… it’s more like those ladies who are so stretched that they make Jigsaw look beautiful.
Loved modo back in the day. The problem with modo is that it feels like it froze in time. The UI literally hasn’t updated in over 10 years. Exact same look and feel which feels outdated. Plus they started pricing indie artists out. Almost all of them moved to blender.
It just didn’t find a niche where it could survive. RIP
It is survival of the fittest. We are down to 4 players in this field. Maya/Max, Houdini, Cinema4d and Blender. Each one has a strong niche and hence entrenched so don’t see them going anywhere in the foreseeable future.
C4D would probably be the next in-line to go, since Maxon did some poor choices acquiring software they shouldn’t have at first place – and doing so with borrowed money- so, let’s see how’s that gonna end for them…
C4D, then ZBrush and then 3DS Max is my guess.
Strongly disagree. Maxon has made very smart purchases like Redshift and Zbrush. Zbrush purchase is the best one because it is the most versatile 3d tool that I have seen out there – from VFX, character design, toy designer, jeweler designers – it is an insanely good purchase.
Regarding C4D it has an entrenched loyal user base and the user base is not price sensitive so they won’t change to blender just because it is free.
My personal opinion is that the software that will remain in development in the
next few years will be 3ds max and Blender.
3ds max is an excellent multimedia platform and can handle many formats and very large files, Blender is free and has good support from the developers.
https://youtu.be/1GMkSOUi-q0?t=1696
Thanks for posting that link. I applaud his effort but I disagree with his rant. If Modo was a profitable product, Foundry would keep it going. If the cost to keep it in development was less than the profit it could generate, they would keep it. I just don’t think there’s a large enough user base to support it, especially compared to their other products.
Foundry isn’t going to be swayed by indie fan boys. Their market is every vfx studio in the world that does compositing. I hope he does convince Foundry to donate the source code. In the end its always good to have another tool at our disposal.
Let me prephrase this here by saying I have not been keeping up with Modo personally. I never used the software past a couple of times trying to get into it but then dipping out because I felt too comfortable in 3ds max at the time.
But I had many friends who were using modo on a daily basis for professional work.
As far as what I have seen from the outside and people have told me is that basically once the foundry acquired modo that the updates fort modo became more and more lackluster.
Which personally surprised me at the time. Nuke was as popular as ever and I figured they wanna get into the 3d market as well to have a companion piece for Nuke and honestly modo had a lot going for it and with some proper development it could have become a bigger name.
But that investment never came. I don’t think they bought it to kill it off because that wouldn’t even make sense for them since it’s not a competing product. Yet here we are.
And even though I am not a modo user I am not really happy about the situation because it sucks when products get shelved that people use professionally. Especially when they had so much potential.
So I’d argue modo not being profitable and it’s fair to assume it wasn’t otherwise they wouldn’t have shelved it is 100% on the foundry. And Greg brings up a solid point their video channel has been doing a lot of the marketing for modo. More at least than what foundry did themselves. So his frustration is more than understandable.
Which is why I hope foundry will work together with him and work on making Modo open source this would allow people who relied on the software to still rely on it and who knows maybe it could get a second wind of users wanting to try it as alternative to blender.
Because in the end we need more competition in the 3d software market and not less.
I really hope they would open source Modo – it is not realistic dream but if it would happen it would mean new era and i think it is good to have competition. Modo was great software.
It is sad that big companies buy these software developers and then they kill the software: Lightwave, Softimage, Modo 🙁
Unfortunately, there’s no way to know how long these small developers would have survived without being bought up.
I look at this in a broader lens. The legendary, ambitious, global competitor generation of UK is slowly leaving the scene. With noone from the new generation to take the mantle and continue the legacy. Modo is a piece of software in this downtrend and a point in a line. UK software development scene is dying.
The main issue of this company’s performance is that the Katana Marie program is practically out of date because supposedly Enril has completely destroyed the future of katana, this company also knows that if artificial intelligence produces a program that it has done, the future of nuke will soon be in danger. It seems to me that this company should add a lot of things to at least get rid of the after effects and should add things in the nuke program so that the rendering system reaches a quality production line.
did you use any of these in production? i guess not 🙂
Please make it free! Better: Open source it.
Will not happen. Too much third party licenses, frameworks and libs in the code. Starts with the im- and exporters already. To make the code base really open source ready would cost lots of money. That’s why so many abandoned software never went open source.
Modo, We hardly knew ye.