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Modo For $299


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Perhaps there's only room for three? Houdini has now displaced Max as on of the big 3? :huh:

hehe... how much is max these days anyway, maybe it's not much more than modo so it's not worth the discount.

M

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Did I hear somewhere that a full Max license is $3000? Or is that not right?

And is Houdini on the list because Houdini users are considered the most likely markets to need a supplimentary modeling tool? I wonder... Perhaps they have another entirely different promotion for Max users in mind... :)

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A full Max License is supposed to be 3499 but I don't think anyone pays that much. Most resellers will offer you a "deal" for 2799 to 2999.

I think that's it for Modo. It was overpriced to begin with. This deal is probably just them testing the water to see if they can sell more licenses at a lower price point. It's going to be pretty hard for them to jack the price back up after this deal.

Has anyone here actually tried Modo? I did and I don't like it at all. It' slow and unnecessarily complicated, not to mention entirely unstable. Their big selling point is their customizable interface, but it really isn't as useful as they make it sound. It basicly comes down to allowing you to throw buttons and groups of buttons wherever you want, but it doesn't offer anything new as far as modeling tools go. It's feels a lot like Lightwave with an amorphous interface. There's a guy at work who swears it's the best thing since sliced bread, though, so what do I know.

If you have an itch to try a standalone modeler, look into Silo. I bought a license this past weekend because I was stranded with nothing but a Mac at my disposal. I think it's a pretty good modeler. Only 100 dollars and they have a 30 day demo (www.nevercenter.com). There's a thread in their forum about upcoming features... They are adding ZBrush like displacement painting which should be pretty cool. It's not without it's own list problems but it's not bad at all for the price. One of the big pluses, to me at least, is that the basic functionality is somewhat familiar to Houdini users. You select primitives, perform an operation, right click to complete. They did do some really stupid things in this software though... Their hotkeys are hard coded, so say for manipulating views, all the key combinations are listed and you choose the operation to correspond to the key combo. I wonder what they were thinking when they did that.

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Marc - I consider making a 'lite' version of Houdini (i.e select, halo, etc.) to be a price drop, just like softimage is doing.

Mcronin - I also had the opotunity to play around with modo but only for few hours. I didn't like it, but it's not fair for me to say anything because I didn't dig much further... Tried the demo of silo, and for me was even harder to get around. For a freeware poly modeler, I'd sugest Wings 3D that is suposed to look a lot like Nendo or Mirai, and sPatch for patch modeling exactly like Animation Master.

Any one know how useful is gMax?

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gMax is not useful at all. It's basicly a really lite version of Max and you can build interfaces for it using flash or xml or something. Here's the major problem with it... You cannot get anything out of the software without and exporter, there is no way to develop an exporter without paying Discreet an assload of money, and you cannot render. It was designed for making game content for games like Quake III and MS flight simulator. In order for gMax to be useful you need to install a "gamepack". A game pack is something like a plugin that includes and interface, tools and exporters to build assets for a specific game title. So, you'd have a game pack for Quake 3 and a Gamepack for Flightsimulator, etc different gamrepacks for different games. Here's the fun part.... Dicreet actually expects developers to make these game packs themselves and pay for the privelege of doing it.

When I was at a game company working for MS, Discreet came by and tried to pitch our team on the idea of supporting Gmax. It's free to end users but on the development side they wanted 1500 per seat we used in production and something like 100K for the SDK and the license to distribute game packs on top of the money would would have to spend developing a game pack in the first place. In the end it was going to cost us something like a quarter of a million dollars to support GMax vs nothing just taking the Maya and Max plugins we already had and throwing them out on the net. To my knowledge no company has actually payed Discreet to license gmax, the gamepacks that do exist were for the most part developed by Discreet themselves to drum up interest.

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I tried Modo for almost a half year. There are are a few nice functions in and when you are familar with the workflow it is nice. But I think it is overpriced. I have to agree with Mcronin - it feels a lot like Lightwave. Silo is a really nice standalone modeler. Easy to learn and the workflow is good. The Topology Brush is a useful tool.

Mcronin is right about Gmax. It is a chance for beginners to learn max-modeling - but there is no chance to export the data. There were also a few problems the online-registration and the key in the past. And the handling of the Gamepacks - one of our authors still hate this stuff <_<

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"...it feels a lot like Lightwave."

Why would it not be so? The team behind Modo is almost the same team that originally developed Lightwave. They left NewTek not a long time ago, and established their own company called Luxology. I guess they've got some rights for the code, since Modo is so alike, and the new version 8.0 of Lightwave was developed by almost entirely new developement team, which claimed to have rewritten the code of Lightwave from the ground up.

Speaking of Modo itself, my impression is that it is nothing more than Lightwave Modeler on very weak steroids. Their new SubDs in the shaded mode bring my P4 2.4G, 1GB RAM, FX1000 system to its knees just like Lightwave's original ones at the quantity of about 50K. There is no renderer, and unlike in Silo (or Hexagon? - don't remember) there is no way to link it to a standalone renderer either. Its export capabilities are limited to OBJ, X3D, ma, LWO and LWO2. There are very few enhancements to UV, and some other tools. The interface is a bit bizzare. On top of that, these new SubDs are useless, cause they can be exported as LWO2 only (Lightwave 8.x format), but Lightwave does not understand them. And they DO HAVE A PROBLEM WITH MODO's STABILITY BIG TIME. This stability issue alone forced me to abandon Modo completely.

So, I tend to agree that it's been largely overpriced for what it offers, and put out on the market way too early. I, personally, hate to find myself being a beta tester of a product for which I paid a full price.

sPatch - I'd rather go with the Animation Master. gMax is may be not that bad by itself, but the way it'd been marketed has made it a deadborn project.

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  • 2 weeks later...
"Digital Domain Adds modo.

Luxology is proud to officially welcome Digital Domain into the modo community. Digital Domain has introduced modo into the production pipeline and has already applied modo to several projects..."

Found this on the Luxology site. Just wondering if anyone can comment on how extensively modo is being used by DD, and how well it's fitting into the pipeline.

Been away for several months. New site is very nice.

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Sigh, there's no modeler like Mirai. I waited, and waited... Silo does feel a bit like Mirai, and serves nicely to satisfy a bit of the nostalgia.

19625[/snapback]

I read somewhere that mirai is back and being beta tested.

Check IZ Ware

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