Modo 11.1 released bringing Unreal connectivity features

New features in the latest version of Foundry’s flagship 3D Software include:

• A new Unreal Bridge, providing a bi-directional connection between both applications to allow entire scenes, or selected elements of a scene, to be pushed and updated. The connection can be remote, on the same machine, or across multiple machines on a network.
• Several improvements to modelling tools, including revamped Topology Pen and standard Smooth tools. Enhanced procedural modelling features include new UV create and smooth operators
• New features to improve UV workflows including a new UV coverage indicator to help efficiently arrange UV maps and a new Box Transform tool to help move them. New tools are added to make detecting potential problems with UV layouts and maintaining uniform texture detail easier, while enhanced UV to SVG exporting provides better control over the real world size of the
  output.
• Viewport performance and quality improvements including the ability to increase or decrease shadow quality with Cascaded Shadow Maps, wireframe drawing has improved with Line anti-aliasing options, and there are new shading modes to to switch between simple, basic, and full – useful to toggle between quick results for general modelling, or to approximate the output from Modo’s internal renderer.
• Vertex normal & baking improvements including object space normal map baking; useful when creating normal maps for static objects in real-time applications. A new Use Polygon Area Smoothing option which weights the normal average based on the size of the polygon, improving smoothing errors. Two new options for vertex illumination baking control what is baked and output, and a contextual menu command that will bake either occlusion, illumination, normal, displacement or texture effects, based on options defined in the dialogue, speeds up the workflow of baking certain mesh features.
• The ability to limit the maximum rendering time before a frames is saved to disk for Preview Render and Preview Render Animation. Zooming improvements mean it’s easier to analyse an in-progress full resolution render, and autosave now saves the current Preview rendered state, making it easy to restart a progressive render from its last saved point, rather than having to start the render again.
• File I/O & Alembic Improvements including Alembic streaming support, greatly speeding up the rate at which large scenes of animated data transfer to other applications. With the ability to stream geometry, particles, simulation meshes, curves, multiple UV sets and material and part tags, it’s possible to work within a much wider range of Alembic related workflows, and import, layout and render large animated scenes from either Modo or other DCC software packages.
• A number of updates to improve usability and much more.

Perpetual licenses of Modo are available for $1799, as well as rental at a cost of $599 per year. A 30 day trial is available. You can find out more on the Foundry’s website and read the full change-log in the release notes.