Modo Indie 11.2V3 released

Foundry has announced the release of Modi Indie 11.2V3, its feature limited version available via Steam. The 11 series added several new features to Modo that are now available to Indie users. These include modelling and procedural modelling improvements such as OpenSubdiv 3 support, new MeshFusion modelling features, enhancements to Auto Retopology and a revamped topology pen, improvements to procedural workflows including UV Create and Smooth operators, plus a new customizable Tool HUD for faster access to frequently used tools. For connecting with 3D Applications this release adds the new Unreal Bridge to provide a bi-directional connection between both applications that allows 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. glTF 2.0 support has also been added. UV Workflows have been improved with the addition of 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. Performance has been improved, including viewport speed and quality. It’s now possible to increase or decrease shadow quality and wireframe drawing has now anti-aliasing options. Several new shading modes are included including the ability to approximate the output from Modo’s internal renderer. Changes to baking tools include the ability to create object space normal maps, a new Use Polygon Area Smoothing option which weights the normal average based on the size of the polygon to improve 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, speed up the workflow of baking certain mesh features. Rendering has seen the addition of a new time-based mode that allows the user to specify a maximum duration before a frame is saved to disk for both preview render and preview render an 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. With this release, Foundry has dropped perpetual licensing in favour of a monthly rental option at £10.99 | $14.99 per month with discounts for longer periods. Existing owners of a perpetual version 10 license will get the upgrade for free. Modo Indie is feature limited rather than income limited. Differences between this version and its big brother are that exports to OBJ, FBX, glTF 2.0 are limited to 100k polys and render resolution is capped at 4K (network rendering is disabled). Scripting is limited: Command eval options, commands, scripts, and command history panel results are unavailable with the exception of undo and history, and Python editor, third-party scripts, and third-party plugins cannot be used. All formats can be imported can it’s only possible to save in .lxf format and export to to OBJ, FBX, and glTF 2.0; image formats are limited to .png, .jpg, .tiff, .tga and .exr. Visit Steam to find out more about Modo Indie 11.