That's exactly what happened… Foundry has wrapped things up. They’ve shut down years and years of work by talented people, pushing aside those of us who passionately love and use Modo. I’d really appreciate it if you could address the whole situation. Your videos are watched not only by Modo enthusiasts but also by others who deserve to know what Foundry has done. Business is business, but shutting down a project that they’ve been systematically phasing out for years is another story. Thank you
I used to be a Modo user starting from version 2 all the way up to 8, and I must say it was an incredible piece of software. I invested a lot of time and effort into it, and the community around Modo was active. Everything changed when the Foundry took over. Their licensing system and subscription model was a major turnoff for many of us. Around the same time, Blender had a significant interface update, and many of us Modo users were willing to give it a chance, despite the initial learning curve. It's disheartening because Modo is genuinely fantastic software, despite the bugs and glitches.
Modo still has perpetual licenses. You can choose if you want to do the subscription or if you just want to buy the perpetual license (aka the "maintenance license").
@@Doofus171 From official site foundry: "-What are my options for buying Modo? -There are two options for purchasing Modo. 1)Individual subscription 2)Maintenance upgrade"
Interesting that you said that about subscriptions. That's exactly how they lost me as a customer. I was quite happy to periodically buy a new update. But I balked at subscriptions. I do 3D graphics in bursts, and during a year might do hardly anything, then another year might do quite a lot. I'd update every couple of years. Subscriptions didn't make sense for me. For someone who was doing 3D all the time, that might have been a different equation. The same thing had happened previously to me with Maya. But now I can pay for Maya for a month or two and then stop again. I mostly use Blender though. (But Nomad and Valence 3D on my M2 iPad Pro are very exciting)
I started with modo 302. I bought every upgrade up to Modo 10. When Foundry took over the quality started to slip. When Brad Peebler left, modo basically died then. I miss it. It was easy to use. I've been trying to get fluent with Blender since 2.8, it gets better all the time, but it still kicks my ass.
My last version was Modo 401. It is too buggy now to really work with and crashes a lot. I looked today at the new 14 and can't justify the cost now. Blender and Plasticity will have to be my new go to. Still not 100% warmed to Blender though. Still to finish a model in it.
Now all the original Luxology folks have left. Allen Hastings left recently, and Modo is now focusing on 3rd party renderer compatibility. If only Tim Jenison had let them re-write Lightwave from the ground up like they wanted with version 6.0, things may have been quite a bit different.
301 for me, made it to 902. Brad Peebler was just phoning it in toward the end, but I enjoyed his podcasts. Blender is pretty good these days, but I think for those of us who modeled in modo, it's hard not to be frustrated at Blender. Modo had such a well thought-out UI and such intuitive key binds. Blender has a lot of great features but it does sometimes bring to mind the old joke "A camel is a horse designed by a committee."
Interesting how Blender success happened at the point where 3D industry started switching to subscription only. It is sad for Modo, I've heard many times it has one of the best modeling tools around. But I feel if they stayed independent they would have much better success, instead they were bought by the Foundry and things went downhill from that point.
Blender success was lucky coincidence in the fact that the interface updated happened about a year before there was a huge NFT digital art boom, blender was free and easily accessible with countless tutorials online. Tons of people flocked to it to try and make money with digital art.
exactly. Same thing happens now with Pixologic zbrush, since they sold their sold to maxon. Subscription only, no free updates, very unemphatic company similar to adobe. The lose many customers and their community breaks apart because the great product Zbrush, lost his soul.
Me, working on my studio's latest project in Modo, while watching this video... "huh..." Haha, I largely agree with the assessment that performance and stability struggles caused most people to peel out around 901 and after. That's definitely been my biggest gripe as well. It's for sure worth noting that the upcoming version of Modo is focusing primarily on performance and speed, with a rewrite of a bunch of core systems, so we'll see how that goes! Personally, the hardest thing to replace for me would be Modo's extremely unique approach to "Order of Operations" rigging... it's so good, that I don't understand how other software could operate without it. I continue to have the opinion that on paper, Modo is insanely good, and would allow you to create almost anything with great efficiency....but that performance cap really does limit what you can accomplish. Looking forward to seeing if V17 starts to turn that around
They lost my after 902 because I balked at the subscriptions. But it also seemed to be losing traction, or anyway mindshare. As a hobbyist, the relative lack of tutorials was an issue for me.
Modo was such an innovative and exciting program back then. It was so ahead of the game with many of its features. Once Luxology sold out and Brad Peebler got fired it was game over. They just didn't know it yet. Another slow, painful death by corporation. RIP Modo.
I was so hyped by Modo around 2010. It is really unfortunate. It's also so sad how Foundry slowly, probably by accident, killed Mischief. That program was a really great breath of fresh air in drawing software.
I adore Modo, it's still my favorite modeler. I had to surrender my license for financial reasons but boy do I miss it. Blender (which I have huge appreciation for for being free and very capable) doesn't hold a candle to modeling with Modo. Modo truly spoiled all who used it.
I am curious what does MODO have in terms of modelling tools that other software doesn't? I hear this a lot from modo users, but none seem to really go into the specifics...
@@anab0licit’s hard to describe without using it but everything just works together super nice. For example one feature I love is the moveable work plane. Say you’re modeling a spaceship and want to put a bunch of details on a specific plane. In other softwares it could be a pain because you’d have to either rotate the ship along the plane and snap it to a viewport or rotate everything as you’re placing it. In Modo you just snap the work plane to the models surface and everything you put on follows in that new coordinate space. (It’s hard to describe but it’s so useful). Also their modifiers are amazing. I haven’t used a software with such nice modifiers (aside from Houdini but that’s different). There’s just a lot of little things that add up to the Modo experience and once you pick it up modeling becomes a joy.
I have to say, overall that's a really good video. You did your research and tried to be fair. I can nitpik with some things. It's been a roller coaster for Modo users. Once they were acquired by Foundry there was a bit of a culture clash between a Silicon Valley startup (Luxology) and what was essentially a Film VFX software vendor owned by a giant investment firm. Foundry didn't ever create their own software, they purchased in-house FilmVFX software and sold it commercially. It has been bought and sold a couple times since and I think is on their 3rd CEO since acquiring Luxology. Pretty much all but a couple of the old Lux folk are gone at this point. However, it's very much NOT dead. They release updates all the time, at a faster face than ever (every couple of weeks now). They have a new product manager and some new devs who are all great. I do think they need to address 'The Blender issue' - but so does every other 3D software company. Blender has all the advantages of a free open-source program with almost none of the weaknesses. They have full-time paid developers, they have access to commercial software plugins that goes through a bunch of workaournds and loopholes to NOT conform to the Open Source rules. At the end of the day, as much as some people love Blender it could be considered pretty anti-consumer. Yep, it's free. But very much not everybody wants to use it - even if you give it to them for free. They would rather pay to use something else. If all those 'something-else' options go the way of the dodo (like Clarisse just did) then Blender isn't really that great for consumers.
Respondeing to the last 2 lines > Why do you think so, Is it because of our own culuured mentality that if we pay for something it automaticaly has more value than something which is available for free, also the old narrative that Free/open source apps are mostly shit beacuse of obvious reasons But that does is changing as tech and ppl are evolving, ppl wants to contribute to open source more and prefer that but still It doesnt mean to replace some other codework but to be as an alternative and thrive towards becoming best and open source for Indie/small groups and in that endeavour, if it attarcts huge base from other software groups then that is just a consequence.
@@A.Shek_ Not sure I even understand your question, why do I think what, exactly? The last two lines are 'They would rather pay for something else'. That's simply a factual statement, not an opinion. The last line (I won't re-write it) is an opinion about having more choices is better than fewer choices. Something I think most people would agree with. Do you really think I feel that software is only valuable if you pay for it? Does that seem like a position a normal person would take? Or is that the epitome of a straw man that you seem eager to argue against?
@Pixelfondue I think over the years it's been easily observable that the price of software and the basic tools that they provide is no longer worth the cost comparably to when you can achieve just the same with something free like Blender. Sure, to get a more premium experience you can pay for addons, but that cost is nowhere close to a yearly fee or even a maintenance cost for that matter. Even without addons and talking plain modeling, people jumped ship because of simple things that took too long for Foundry to update in Modo, like incorrect miter in bevel operations and the rounded edge shader having artifacts. The 'procedural modeling tools' being called a feature, when it's a poorly executed modeling/modifier stack system hacked together. On and on... there's no value in that. Even Tor Frick has been exploring Blender, despite I heard him in his streams in the past talking shit on it saying, "Tsk tsk tsk, Blender blender blender.." in a dismissive tone, and now it's even become more worth his time to learn and work with. Foundry messed up big not capitalizing and marketing Modo for game dev with Tor Frick. I mainly quit MODO after 10 because it become palpably apparent that the developers no longer had the support and ownership stopped caring. There's a reason that even MODO's own community laughs at the poor marketing and development priorities and has dubbed the software as a 'professional shoe modeler'.
@@sepigraph yeah, lot of truth in there. Modo is lacking on a few front, biggest being speed and price. Needs to be a lot faster and imo a LOT cheaper. It's still unique enough some people will prefer to use it - but it will never be like Blender.
It took me some time to get used to Modo, but once I got over that, I didn't look back. I still use it to this day. Modo does innovate in a lot of areas. Round edge shaders as normal maps for hard surface models was what initially got me in like, 7 years ago. And now you have curve booleans. The primitive slice is looking greater than ever! Everything to make modeling less of a chore, I see happening in Modo. Not to mention, best-in-class UV tools to which probably RizomUV might be the only competitor in the market. Modo's stack-based rigging system is something that no other tools have. Rich Hurrey speaks a lot about this. And I do see great animation tools esp for the export of poses and actions separately in one file, which is incredibly useful for game dev. Sad that all these are not realized or marketed as such. Everyone says Blender can do it all. Sure it can, but the user experience using that thing, for me at least, was the worst ever. The best part about Modo is that it just takes a click or 2 to get something that usually takes 4-6 clicks in any other software. Which makes it one of the best tools to use for working with 3D.
It's great to see you have done this video about Modo. For now, Modo is alive and a new version has been (silently😅) released every year. Anyway, I have seen changes in the last year that gave me a new hope about the development. Also, I think most people and users underestimate the "shoe" thing that happened to Modo. Modo is widely used in this industry as far as I know, and I saw recently a few job openings for different big brands where it was the only DCC mentioned. Probably without that segment, modo wouldn't be able to survive. Lightwave didn't look outside the media and entertainment industry and fell down much worst than Modo.
I did professional archviz and product viz for years with Modo. FANTASTIC program. Probably still the best traditional hard surface modelling toolset ever, and the render engine was very solid, too. Eventually, when I switched to doing more coding and less art, I stopped updating. After being several editions behind and hearing great things about Blender 2.8, I started learning Blender instead. Nowadays, I use Blender because of the amazing community support it has and, well... it's free. But I still have a great deal of fondness for Modo, and do still occasionally miss a feature here or there.
I learned 3D on Modo, the interface when compared to max and maya was so clean and intuitive. When blender had its UI overhaul, I felt they were deeply inspired by Modo (which in turn was later replicated by C4D).
I was the Lead Artist at Naked Sky Entertainment in the first game projects, and was responsible for bringing Modo in as our central 3d tool for combining multiple modeling, optimization, texture, and baking workflows. As President of SpinCycle Animation and then iXL Animation we had worked with the Lightwave guys for years for KidsWB! and others, and I was a very early beta tester on pre-release Modo and was also a presenter for them at the NAB conference. Good memories and powerful tools. I still use it sometimes, but not as often as I once did.
The Modo developers are paying high attention to the instability problems and are doing some architectural changes to address that. Personally, I think it was because the architecture to combine Lightwave's Modeler and Layout, which was one of the factors to create Modo in the first place, needed to be thought out for scalability and adapt to newer CG demands. It was risky, to be sure. Besides all that is true about Modo from the market perspective, it's still a great software overall. It's also an underrated motion graphics package with MeshOps.
I am getting back into 3D as a hobby after being completely out of it for about 12 years now. Decided to look into Modo, it's been so long. Went to their webpage and see they are using a subscription model for pricing. NOPE, not doing that ever again. We need to stand up for ourselves as consumers. The subscription model is fine for large companies, but it's the honor system, and after too many no-fixes from Autodesk on their subscriptions, along with their half-arsed new feature implementations, I will never willingly be a subscription customer again. You spend far more over the long run than if you just buy the software and use it for years. I do miss the days when Alias's Maya and Softimage were competing against Autodesk, those were some good times, especially when XSI went mainstream. Then Autodesk came in like a wrecking ball and ruined all of that. How that company has not been broken up as the world's biggest 3d software monopoly is a mystery to me. On the subject of Modo, the learning curve was pretty high, it's not that intuitive compared to Maya or XSI, but it produced excellent results in the hands of experienced users.
It's a bummer, because every time Blender comes out with some AMAZING features, it's a feature Modo already had. But the problem is, no one knows. Modo needs to come out with more training materials. Pixel Fondue does a great job, but that's pretty much it. They need more tutorials to show off all the cool things it can do.
That's the wrong way to look at it. Modo had some features that Blender lacked, but they were often poorly designed or rushed, and then ignored. Blender's EEVEE was 1000% better than Modo's AVP, which was limited in what it could show you without actually doing a render. Blender pushed sculpting to the point where Zbrush users actually switched to use it, while that would never have happened with Modo's very limited sculpting feature set. What ultimately carried modo was its original modeling toolset and workflow, while many of the areas that showed promise were ignored (sculpting, texture painting, viewport..etc), and the new stuff rushed or poorly designed. I mean the bevel in Modo was broken for so long, while Blender fixed theirs right away.
@@deuswulf6193 Blender has things modo needed, but from my standpoint it's always Blender that's seemed poorly designed. The UI is so clunky with it's counter-intuitive key binds.
@@ronaldbell7429 There are two aspects to this, both of which are true. Modo's "new features" past a certain point (around the time Luxology sold out to The Foundry), were either poorly designed or rushed and thus half-baked, but included anyway in order to check some boxes. Blender started as a poorly designed application, yes, and they had a ton of criticism over the years for this, up until 2.8 at least. That started to change with some skillful people contributing to the UX. Unfortunately, its not application wide, but focused on key areas. Blender is not as smart as Modo started out as being, but with the GUI layout change, 3rd party addons and automation (many are game changers), and industry standard control scheme, this changed. Call it steps forward in good design, while Modo was taking steps backwards. When discussing intuitiveness, that's based on how familiar it feels to the user. I would not call Modo intuitive unless you make some changes right after booting up the software, that being turning off track ball rotation, hiding the work plane, and switching keymap. Blender, likewise requires one to use the industry standard keymap, which is surprisingly similar to Modo's Maya keymap. Uses the same 1-4 keys to switch between components, QWER for the object, rotation, scale..etc Modo is also very clunky when it comes to the properties panel, it was one of the worst parts about Modo especially as more stuff was added, the space it was in became over crowded. While Blender was smart enough, even back in the early days, to break it up into sections and overlays, presented visually with icons and breaks in the GUI. Modo might be better off now that a certain person finally took over the reigns, but the damage was done by some people who won't be named, and by the Foundry itself, which is a horrible company.
@@deuswulf6193 you are just argumentating against Modo's change to be a subscription only program. Blender only has what you said because it is Community Based software. You are comparing something Modo had YEARS before Blender with things Blender has today.
Part of the reason why Maya became the standard tool for 3d production was from the lessons that were learned from prior tools such as a kinemation, dynamation, and power animator. The developers of Alias|Wavefront built off of their knowledge from their previous tools. At the time, applications were broken into various components. Modeling tools and animation tools were separate. Alias|Wavefront did a massive amount of R&D and came to the conclusion that the way forward for 3d production was interoperability. Modeling, animation, particles were no longer separate operations. The tools existed inside the same application and could share and use the same data sets. This also meant that there was a consistency to the UI across all aspects of the tool. Modo caters to the niche lightwave user. Lightwave was a fine tool for its time but some of its workflows have become obsolete. Modo is a continuation of that lightwave design philosophy. This is why the menus and interface are inconsistent and at times incoherent. (Blender has this problem but they have made strides to remedy this problem) The modo developers actually see modo's lack of interoperability as a strength and not a weakness. The other problem modo is facing is an aging user base. For modo to have a viable future as a production tool it needs an influx of new users. Modo needs an overhaul to face modern production problems. Modo developers should not be concerned with alienating the user base and just make the changes to modo that will empower users. Can modo change? Yes. Will it?. Hard to say, the developers will have to fight their core user base on updating and fixing modo to meet today's production challenges. And there are a variety of reasons why this might not happen. Some of the users that sell scripts and/or plugins for modo would rather modo not be updated.
Man, i started with Modo 301 and upgraded each single release until a few years after Foundry entered the game. But really, it was frustrating to find same bugs release after release and in last years each new release was celebrated as epic, but in reality with no noticeable enhancements from my point of view. It was nice anyway. And i still have it installed somewhere on my ssd.
Yo so good to have you talking on modo today, i was luncky enough to work thispackage at my last job, modo felt complex at first but after a while its really awesome. However i don't feel blender was a reason behind modo decline, but kostly modo itself modo 15 was supper buggy, couldn't handle large dense scene and used to crash alot. But the nail in the coffin was when render engine such as vray stopped their integration with modo. But still today i love it❤
One thing that is particularly unique to Foundry software is the AVP (Advanced Viewport), which ships in Modo. It looks better than the Maya 2.0 Viewport, and I think it supports raytracing as well using OpenGL! I'd argue it goes above what the Hydra Storm OGL render delegate has as well, which used to be the best till AVP came around.
They really dropped the ball with rendering. A few years ago, the modo renderer was really quick for a CPU system. But the March of GPU rendering couldn’t be stopped. Still a great renderer, but they should have fought for more integrations sooner
I'm a Modo user and what he says is true. It is a fantastic modeler but the Foundry just doesn't have the resources that AutoDesk has and they can't offer it for free like Blender. It's not their fault, they are getting squeezed between two powerful market forces. Luxology is addressing many bugs and improving performance but they will always face competition from two fronts, Blender and AutoDesk.
The real tragedy is the loss of Maya best competition, softimage. That software was key learning how to model. But it was bought and liquidated by the autodesk monster. RIP softimage. 😢
rip softimage. thats partly why i gravitated towards modo. it had the same clean interface in a way. i often wish modo would grab some things from it (nurbs)
After Autodesk killed softimage, I got out of the 3d business. Maya and 3ds Max are both overpriced crap, Modo is lightwave+ with an absolutely idiotic texturing system, and Blender is a kids toy made by people who don't understand how a 3d program should work. I picked up Cinema 4d, but it just couldn't compare to the ease and power of Softimage and the Texturing system is also pretty retarded.
I started using modo in its early beta, when the software engineer on the stage proudly said "modo's rendering engine is called 24 hours engine, not because it takes 24 hours to render, but I coded it in 24 hours." I was amazed by the team's genius. That was a decade ago.
Ah, I seriously loved Modo, and was right there with version 102, up to 10. Great toolset! I gave up on it though, pretty soon after the Foundry bought it. Instability issues were abound, and they introduced a subscription model (*shakes fist at SaaS*) which was confusing, and ultimately too expensive for me. I don't blame Brad (Peebler) for getting out... he'd put his whole life into Lightwave, then Modo. But for a little while, it really felt like a family. Lots of great support, no stupid subscriptions, continuous development. Fun with a capital 'F'. Oh, and I was one of those users who really loved the layers-based material/texturing system. It felt like Photoshop. Well, a bit, anyway. What stopped me using Modo? At around the same time that I was becoming increasingly disillusioned with Modo/Foundry, Blender came out with 2.8. Game-changer. Haven't looked back.
I used Lightwave in the late 90s and early 2000s. It was the go to for tv animation before I switched to blender Lightwave, C4D and Softimage was the softwares I like more than Max and Maya. They were easier to use versus Max and Maya which was a convoluted mess. I remember MODO but it never seemed to pick up steam like Max or Maya did just like people thought Rhino would for industrial design.
Saying Blender killed Modo is plain wrong. It is a big factor in it's decline, but there are others two. Modo just struggled to find it's dominant industry (i.e. Maya with Film & Animation, Max with ArchVis & Games, Houdini with VFX, C4d with Motion Design), and they went all in on the Shoe design market and that didn't work out. Not enough people designing shoes I guess. Foundry are now positioning Modo back as a General 3D tool to help with the influx of 3d the metaverse has been promising, so the next couple of years will be key to it's future. Most forget, but Modo was a early player in the Indie licencing model, they just went too restrictive (as is the Foundry way). There's rumours of a shakeup in this space, so lets see what happens and hopefully it gets in the hands of more artists, as Modo is really a great tool and doesn't deserve to be shelved.
Long time modo user here. Used it from v1 to v12 before ultimately switching to Blender. There were several things that caused people to jump from the modo ship. While performance was one of them, the main one, it seems, was Foundry's pricing and move to a maintenance/subscription model. Modo became cost-prohibitive for many indies and who wanted to financially support a software that was quickly falling behind the development of the other 3D software, especially Blender? With the move to subscription, development seemed to slow even more with certain bugs languishing for months and, in some cases, years. And while modo remains a great modeling tool, there were other parts of the software that felt abandoned.
Not bad! This is a decent breakdown of what happened. As a MODO user, from my perspective, it was the unstable and sluggish performance of MODO that really killed it for me. The Modeller is easily still the best in the world. But the developers never could get past the issues of instability or sluggishness. Which seemed to indicate it was a foundational issue (perhaps?). Your breakdown of Blender also shows the brilliance of blender's development and how such a program which was belittled intentionally is now turning heads with it's raw power. I am now embroiled in learning blender. Yes, it's clunky compared to MODO and yes, it's going to take some serious muscle memory development but it is beginning to sink in. At least I am not winching every time I push a button to execute, expecting the inevitable crash. So yeah pretty bang on! However, I still choose to model in MODO... no reason not to. Blender is a very powerful option and well worth getting to know. But MODO, when it's working as expected is still to this day... Poetry in motion. ; )
I self-learned on Google Sketchup, went to college to learn Autodesk Maya, and my first job in the industry landed me on Modo. Loved it so much that I hold a personal license now. I have tried to migrate over to Blender so many times, but the keypress-to-execute timing for a lot of Blenders commands is too long. I should be able to just press W and have my transition tools. I shouldn't need to hit 2-3 buttons to do BASIC commands.
Sad but true. The steady decline of Modo is infuriating. Foundry is pretty trash. Now Modo is falling behind and it is severely overpriced for what little Foundry invests in it. User since 302 here, but I stopped pumping more money into this black hole last year.
The problem is The Foundry. After the Foundry bought, it never integrates Modo with NUKE, MARI, and Katana. The development of Modo is slow. Therefore, it can't bring any impact to 3D artits and the insdustry. I love the modeling concept of Modo and Silo at the beginning. Over time, autodesk realized the same concept into their products. Modo and Silo lost their unique features. Finally, Blender replaces the position of Modo. I start to make Blender like Modo and Maya with Add-ons.
I remember everyone thinking Modo would finally get good texturing improvements with the help from the Mari devs, nope. They let the modo texturing rot so you had to move over to Mari, and then the cost for that was not something a indie would normally pay for.
Modo investers and finance plan pump up millions of $ in the development per year specielly in the beginning and like in blender some steps back happens in the devevelopment & test phases like in blender... What the blender devs. and comunity established with a fraction of money with a open design and share philosophie is a absolut milestone of 2d 3d software history ..
@@MAGAMAN Care to explain what makes them terrible? Their interfaces are what make them generally better than the competition, generally speaking. The fact they have "rooms" or spaces which can leverage specific needs work really well, and everything else is basically a copy of every other major application. Modo post foundry acquisition was generally a downward spiral of bad design choices, where as Blender was the opposite.
Well, i am a new Modo user and i am very happy with it and the new features and updates are getting better and better, and they are fixing bugs very fast pushing point releases, as for now we have Modo 16.1 v5 , and i am excited for the upcoming Modo 17 release which will be mainly focused on performance, and to talk about Blender and Modo and their user base respectively like that, it's not fair, yes Blender is a great 3D software, but to be honest most of it's user base is because it is free, make it 1500$/year subscription plan and no body will touch it again, many Blender users believe that Blender will become an industry standard , in my opinion that's impossible, why? take Windows, Mac, and our great free and open source operating system "Linux", Linux market share is probably 1% or so, despite being better than Windows or Mac ("technically"), do the math or the business logic, you will get to the conclusion.
Linux is not one product though, there ae many variants that work against consumer uptake. But Linux is the king when it comes to servers. That is where it excels and best suited, and it shows.
Sad to see MODO losing its presence in the industry, It's such a fast modeler. Once Autodesk killed Softimage XSI, MODO was the software I moved to since for me it was the only software that could match it's modeling speed, and neat tools Softimage had (not counting ICE obvs). Nowadays all I really do is organic sculpting in Mudbox so I don't really need heavy duty 3D software so Blender is now the wave for me to just to make basic objects to be sculpted, and UVs. Shame, Modo is still super cool I just can't really justify £70ish a month for it.
for 10 year I use Modo, but mmm now blender is my software I dont like blender no I dont, but is powerful and kinda easy, hope MODO returns to the old glory
Modo was one of those foundational stone softwares that contributed immensely. Making an artist feel like they can do something is the biggest challenge. Naturally when they get better they want more complex softwares, and the past is forgotten. But such softwares define what can we called a ‘workflow’ (how to approach an art making process) and Modo was one of such for me.
The one thing that drew me to Modo was the user interface. It's amazing how many of the main 3D software we use for modeling have uninspiring UI. Blender has come a long way, but I've always believed that Blender's tools and software stability with Modo's UI design would make the ultimate 3D software. Modo is simply beautiful.
I've been using Modo since 301. This is all sadly true. Nevertheless it's still my #1 tool for non procedural modeling and UV. Despite of this decade long decline, I truly hope that it will catch up with others someday. I'm still a Modo guy :)
The only way that can happen is if they overhaul Modo to have a refreshed look (partially because it will draw people who are willing to give it another look, just like Blender did with 2.8+). The other thing they have to do is go back to the basics, make a cheap and affordable tool with a perpetual license, focus it on game dev rather than shoes. It was so stupid for Modo's leadership at the time to focus on shoes, which was a niche market even in product design. Get the community AWAY from the stupid Foundry forums, which are now dead anyway. I doubt the Foundry will ever let any of that happen though, they are stiff and corporate. They would rather let it die out and harvest the parts, or sell it off entirely.
I Have Blender in my toolset but its Really clunky to model with Modos Workplane always Brings me back, Blenders Cursor is not the same this is coming from someone who originaly came from Blender.
I enjoyed Modo. I learned with 3ds max so Modo was easy to pick up and start using. I had to cut costs and since it was a hobby i didnt renew my subscription for it, thinking blender will work fine. I dread using blender so much, I barely model any more. Its so unintuitive i have to pretty much relearn how to use it everytime. Modos updates add features i want to use where as blenders seem like gimmicks im not interested in. Sadly modo keeps increasing the price and no longer sell perpetual licenses.
in 2016 Foundry started in Brazil a witch hunt... All independent artist, who tagged modo in their behance, or something like that, portfolio, received a contact from Foundry to buy the software, to became legal, but Here in Brazil the softwares are too expensive for an independent artist. So it was a massive run to take the tagg off, or migrate to Blender. So, those who used a pirate version, but spread the propaganda of modo, has left.... and all the agencys and companys, who has the money for license, had to change software becaouse there was no more artist who worked with modo... then the modo died in Brazil.
I think Luxology sold out to the Foundry because they kept losing money, despite Brad Peebler being a great inspiring personality to have as head of a 3d SW company. Modo was cool, exciting and had a beautiful interface and viewport, but was almost impossible to use because of constant crashes. I remember having to switch my project from Modo to 3ds Max so I could complete it on time.
I also started with modo 302 and after trying Maya, 3DS, Lightwave, and a few other lesser known apps I found modo and it changed my life, Literally. It actually got me to change careers for a little while and I loved it. Over the years I moved away from 3D modeling but recently wanted to get back into it so I got the latest version of modo, specifically for the MeshFusion tools. I could barely get through 5 minutes without it crashing to desktop when trying to do the most basic operations. The workflow and the results I was getting were very different from even the latest tutorials and documentation. It felt completely alien to me. That on top of a subscription model? It pains me to say it but modo is just a part of my history at this point.
The last 3 years I haven’t been modeling as much, but all tried to use it a few times starting with MeshFusion and frustrated when it was easy to crash while trying to explore with it. Unfortunately many of us just got an email from The Foundry regarding Modo Maintenance. They are officially announcing it has officially ended, or winding down, development and pretty my much over following the release of 17.1 later this year. 😢
it's sad, because i would say that modo has one of the best modeller in the market. Great selection tools i miss very often in Blender. Performance was not bad until you try to animate things. But this was not the main Problem. Since foundry bought it, the whole software seemed to me like abandoned. The development slow, many bugs were not fixed, new ones appear. And at the end of the day, the expensive licenses. Expensive and unflexible. All this played a part. Same with lightwave, which i used as one of my first 3d software before i switched to softimage. Many good technologies disappear, because of bad management, wrong marketing decision and also primitive greed.
I started with Lightwave in the 90’s then moved to Modo to model. I still have the 1.0 retail box in fact. I too cheered for it’s intuitive interface. I even got the school I taught at to buy a pile of licenses and ended up teaching it for a few years. Blender updated and turned into the ender of my relationship with Modo at version 15. I still speak fondly of it and miss many of the very well designed features and layout. Now Blender is my daily driver and Modo feels like a classic car collecting dust in my garage. Some days I use it for the sake of nostalgia, but I feel so rusty at it.
I loved Modo but when it was sold to The Foundry and the subscription and pricing increases started to become a little too much I gave up and switched to Blender. I blame not only the Foundry but also the management team-they just didn't seem to know act they heck they were doing and the marketing really became pretty terrible-and the upgrading price. Too sad...I spent years learning this software and it was good in its day.
Thank you for this. I've been unplugged from the modelling world for a long time and honestly wasn't aware how far it had fallen. Modo was orignally a joyous return to my modelling roots with Lightwave, before delving into Maya and Softimage. Does anyone know why Foundry has been neglecting it?
I got on the Modo wagon at the get go but finally had to say goodbye after 601. Great package when it wasn't crashing. Now mostly Lightwave with some Blender - like 'em both!
@@EightNineOne I heard it has gotten better and I downloaded the 14 demo but was never able to get it activated and haven't bothered since. LW got better in the mean time and Blender is now amazing and very user friendly now since the changes to the UI. Modo has lost it's chance with me I'm afraid especially with the pricing the way it is.
@@TheLightWaveGuy I haven't touched Lightwave in quite a while, but I am curious to see if its new owners can turn things around. It is such a tough market now days.
@@alankott3129 We still use it at work so I am happy it will see updates/keep running with new hardware etc.. LW is just fine for what we do but I am enjoying using Blender in my spare time.
part of the problem is that once Modo penetrated the product design marketplace, Luxology moved their focus to that market and neglected other production-related advances for years.
Lol. Modo is still used by a lot of studios in both film and game industry. Blender did not kill Modo. Modo still has the absolute best UI and logical interface of any 3D modeling package. Modo is also fast and responsive and isnt a resource hog like many other 3D modeling packages. Blenders UI still sucks and still carries a lot of issues (even with the 3rd party reskins and addons available). And Blender has issues with hangups when it starts to chew away at resources.
I love Modo's poly modelling and UV tools, but since my subscription expired last month I have been wondering if I should pay another $719/year and I simply can't justify this price tag. Please, keep in mind that I plan to get back to working for the Footwear Design industry and Modo would be the go-to software in this case. But I have been living in Brazil, with no fixed job or fixed income and the monthly minimum wage here is the equivalent to $285. Would you pay the equivalent of 2.5 months of work simply to use a software which doesn't even deliver a consistent flow of upgrades and lacks stability and rendering capabilities? I really wish somehow Modo finds success in the future, and maybe I'll justify spending that much money in it once again. For now, believe it or not, my solution will be to go back to Modo Indie, and get good in Blender asap. It feels like I'm back in 2017, haha.
hilarious thumbnail.... yeah some artists swear by certain software. i got hip to softimage thru vitaly (of course) and he makes it look like the best 3d modeler ever. rene mitchell (won nvidia metropia 2042 contest) uses maya and swears by that. learned about modo from tor frick's article in vertexhd. I use blender. so many options i really feel like it's just preference and what you've been exposed to.
in the early days of Modo was a game changer for moddeling and development speed.. but the time moves on... and the price tag is for companys okay but for the single content producer it was always a big weak spot in the finance calculation ... Blender have even again a long way to go to have that typ of tool arsenal in place.. the add on situation helps a lot these day to close the gap more or less...
I used lw3D and then modo since their very first versions, for years they were both cool softwares but since foundry acquired luxology they changed their economic model after some years, not only they took the subscription route but also raised the price for the upgrade, making it less and less useful for an hobbyist like me, so as many i decided to switch to blender even if lw and modo will still have a special place for me, foundry just made some bad decisions, in my opinion, that make their user base to flee. it's pity.
i used to use modo, i tried it briefly, but didn't go past version 10, which was one of the last perpetual versions i think. What attracted me to modo at first was the uv mapping system (which i found a lot better than max's or maya's back then), the boolean system, the kitbashing workflow and the dynamic unit measurement system, which showed you the unit scale of the scene in realtime in the viewport, and at which scale you were at depending on how close to the origin the camera was zoomed in, that's something i've not seen any other 3d package do.
I tried several years ago a trial version of Modo 3D. It had all the features but for only 30 days. I really loved the interface over let say Maya. At that time also prefered the UI over Blender 2.79. But now Blender in many ways look like MoDo 3D. Blender has been my favorite 3D software for several years. I doubt I will use another software for 3D in the future. Blender can do everything I need and it does it very well. But this is just based on my own personally taste. I understand a lot of people would disagree.
Modo is still amazing, their main weakness is price (hard to compete vs "Free"), and maybe speed in large scenes (which is getting addressed in version 17). Probably the best poly modeler out there, and incredible procedural capabilities if you can afford it, or were lucky to buy a perpetual license. Could also benefit from a free Indie version
I tried out Modo once Foundry started building a Nuke pipeline for it, around 2012 or so (maybe even earlier). I was really impressed by Modo's features and was dead sure it's gonna be huge. I wasn't that invested in 3D back then, so I always wanted "to get back at it". What eventually brought me into 3D was... well, the Blender 2.8 craze. I would have gladly given Modo another shot, but since it's not part of my Nuke subscription, well...
This video is trying to say too much about the topic without actual knowledge. They just did not pay enough attention to performance. Even though modo still has the most robust/capable modeling toolset, it just got impossible to handle ever increasing tri/tex counts of production environments. When the industry embraced 4k monitors, the performance took an additional massive dive. I was there going from fastest package to the slowest - it was in a way quite humiliating. Maybe Foundry took too much revenue and did not allow thorough maintenance builds. As modo is not really dead yet like the video suggests, it might still make a comeback because they are actually working on the performance now. If they manage to fix the performance, then nothing can deny the power of the modeling toolset.
I used and Loved Modo, but had to let it go. For me it was the low performance. On Complex Archi Scenes everything was just too slow. Shadertree had issues too which never seemed to be resolved after a few updates.
I'm sorry too. I loved it and still do. But it seems to me that the world just passed them by and they really didn't want to notice. Now I'm learning Houdini and Blender. I still have a license for this year, when it expires I will decide whether to continue or not. I'll see how much continuous work I have left.
Worked with a bunch of 3d software over the years. Still using Modo. Tried Blender for a few months, made a couple of small personal projects. Simply didn't like it. As far as UX goes it felt like a steep downgrade. The fact that they dropped conformity to the VFX Reference Platform after only 2 years make me wonder if it really is the solution its trying to sell itself. So for me, Modo for modeling and UV and Houdini for everything else will still be the way of the land.
In fact, modo is still an attractive package (especially for Blender users because, unlike the latter, it has an absolutely logical and systematized interface), but its real-time visualization system is full of bugs and simply cannot be normally perceived as a working one.
Brad Peeble left and ... Well i feel they lost momentum once they were bought by foundary. Like any big corp no need to inovate sonce there are just very few 3d software. Autodesk killed softimage. Niw we have maya, Houdini, blender, modo. For modeling zbrush, 3d coat.. done
It's a great piece of software. But... I was Modo user about 10 years. It's still great to do some homebrew projects. But it's absolutely unsuitable to handle the large scenes even with using of replicators on modern workstation with 13900K, 192Gb RAM and NVIDIA 4090 graphics card. It's like a slideshow. 3ds max works with these projects very easy on my workstation. Modo's developers ignored that problem for decades. That's why I gave up Modo few years ago.
Still love it. Cannot afford the maintenance as a hobbyist. Once the community was ignored the money dried up. Community is everything. If you don't water it and give it sunshine it dies. Time to spin it off to some true believers.
Modo is great and has made major improvements!! 16.1 is a game changer. 17 is due to release this summer and will be loaded with bug fixes plaquing all the way back to the 7 series. It will also be introducing new rendering (cycles render engine) and features. They are also making USD more available so third party companies can implement their engines into Modo a lot easier. Modo still has and always had the best modeling tools over any other software. listen in on the live streams with the devs so you can get an idea of the future for Modo, its nothing like how you claim it is lol. So much stuff has been improved and is still improving. Animation, Rendering, Modeling, etc are all being focused on and fixed which is the major focus in the 16 and 17 series.
Your comments, while obviously supporting Modo (employee/marketing exec?) do not address the comments. The key issue appears to be price in a saturated market and the subscription model. Fail to answer these and you won’t gain traction.
@@Watche777 The subscription is the issue IMO, perpetual pricing is only available for existing users. Which is awful. Also the comment above about Cycles is conjecture, they're implementing hydra but no native renderer has been announced and there might not be one bundled with 17. That being said, I'd be kinda upset if Cycles was their end choice, it's a decent renderer but not one I'd like to see in a commercial product. Cycles' shortcomings would be a lot harder to ignore if I were paying for it. One thing that IS coming in a non-commercial version, which hopefully will attract back some hobbyist users if they market it properly.
Yeah- Running off Allen Hastings and focusing on 3rd party renderers isn't a confidence builder. Allen was responsible for the Lightwave and Modo renderers and he wasn't the problem. The Foundry is just shooting themselves in the other foot here.
Has foundry acquired anything that hasn't since died... Even magix has done a better job of taking care of their acquisition's, which really is a low bar.
Great overview. I would add that to this day, Modo has no High DPI support. This is SUCH a PITA for experienced users... It must a complete show stopper for anyone that's trying Modo for first time. What's the point of having great, or even state of the art modeling tools if you can't see what you're doing? Even more sad, High DPI support has been on the 'road map' since about version 12. Watching the release video for Modo 17, I see that it's road map yet again. Though NOT as feature that will be released any time soon. It's road map to be worked on. They even admit that it won't be there for 17.1 and also that it won't be there for 17.2 . I don't know wether to laugh or cry. So sad. So ridiculous. 😥😥😥
It makes me so sad. I still use Modo for modelling as I still find enjoyable to model in. It was the software that opened the door for me and made me feel like I could make anything. But now it seems so far behind and increasingly feels dated. I use C4D for my final scenes and rendering as modelling in C4D still sucks. I've got high hopes for the modo 17, but this will be it's last chance, but I still worry for how long it will be supported.
I have to say vray dropping modo didn't help, those two were my go to. As others have mentioned the pricing is a big issue, especially for freelancers. Autodesk/Max had the sense to offer a reduced cost version for those earning under a certain amount a year (I don't know if they are still doing that), it would have been nice if the foundry had offered something similar. Furthermore the renders I don't think are on the same level as Max and Cinema 4D with their various plug-in renderers. It kind of reminds me of the lightwave days, where what was being marketed was predominantly cartoon like material.
That's exactly what happened… Foundry has wrapped things up. They’ve shut down years and years of work by talented people, pushing aside those of us who passionately love and use Modo. I’d really appreciate it if you could address the whole situation. Your videos are watched not only by Modo enthusiasts but also by others who deserve to know what Foundry has done. Business is business, but shutting down a project that they’ve been systematically phasing out for years is another story.
Thank you
I used to be a Modo user starting from version 2 all the way up to 8, and I must say it was an incredible piece of software. I invested a lot of time and effort into it, and the community around Modo was active. Everything changed when the Foundry took over. Their licensing system and subscription model was a major turnoff for many of us. Around the same time, Blender had a significant interface update, and many of us Modo users were willing to give it a chance, despite the initial learning curve. It's disheartening because Modo is genuinely fantastic software, despite the bugs and glitches.
Modo still has perpetual licenses. You can choose if you want to do the subscription or if you just want to buy the perpetual license (aka the "maintenance license").
@@Doofus171 From official site foundry:
"-What are my options for buying Modo?
-There are two options for purchasing Modo.
1)Individual subscription
2)Maintenance upgrade"
No longer great. The Foundry has destroyed it and took our money.
Interesting that you said that about subscriptions. That's exactly how they lost me as a customer. I was quite happy to periodically buy a new update. But I balked at subscriptions. I do 3D graphics in bursts, and during a year might do hardly anything, then another year might do quite a lot. I'd update every couple of years. Subscriptions didn't make sense for me. For someone who was doing 3D all the time, that might have been a different equation. The same thing had happened previously to me with Maya. But now I can pay for Maya for a month or two and then stop again. I mostly use Blender though. (But Nomad and Valence 3D on my M2 iPad Pro are very exciting)
Sometimes changes are not great.
It was also expensive. The Foundry never even tried lowering the price and focusing on it being the best modeller.
I started with modo 302. I bought every upgrade up to Modo 10. When Foundry took over the quality started to slip. When Brad Peebler left, modo basically died then. I miss it. It was easy to use. I've been trying to get fluent with Blender since 2.8, it gets better all the time, but it still kicks my ass.
My last version was Modo 401. It is too buggy now to really work with and crashes a lot.
I looked today at the new 14 and can't justify the cost now.
Blender and Plasticity will have to be my new go to.
Still not 100% warmed to Blender though. Still to finish a model in it.
Now all the original Luxology folks have left. Allen Hastings left recently, and Modo is now focusing on 3rd party renderer compatibility. If only Tim Jenison had let them re-write Lightwave from the ground up like they wanted with version 6.0, things may have been quite a bit different.
Literally this. Brad Peebler was sort of like the canary.
301 for me, made it to 902. Brad Peebler was just phoning it in toward the end, but I enjoyed his podcasts. Blender is pretty good these days, but I think for those of us who modeled in modo, it's hard not to be frustrated at Blender. Modo had such a well thought-out UI and such intuitive key binds. Blender has a lot of great features but it does sometimes bring to mind the old joke "A camel is a horse designed by a committee."
Exactly same! Foundry ruined it
Interesting how Blender success happened at the point where 3D industry started switching to subscription only. It is sad for Modo, I've heard many times it has one of the best modeling tools around. But I feel if they stayed independent they would have much better success, instead they were bought by the Foundry and things went downhill from that point.
I wonder if Zbrush will share the same faith.
Blender success was lucky coincidence in the fact that the interface updated happened about a year before there was a huge NFT digital art boom, blender was free and easily accessible with countless tutorials online. Tons of people flocked to it to try and make money with digital art.
exactly. Same thing happens now with Pixologic zbrush, since they sold their sold to maxon. Subscription only, no free updates, very unemphatic company similar to adobe. The lose many customers and their community breaks apart because the great product Zbrush, lost his soul.
Me, working on my studio's latest project in Modo, while watching this video... "huh..."
Haha, I largely agree with the assessment that performance and stability struggles caused most people to peel out around 901 and after. That's definitely been my biggest gripe as well. It's for sure worth noting that the upcoming version of Modo is focusing primarily on performance and speed, with a rewrite of a bunch of core systems, so we'll see how that goes! Personally, the hardest thing to replace for me would be Modo's extremely unique approach to "Order of Operations" rigging... it's so good, that I don't understand how other software could operate without it. I continue to have the opinion that on paper, Modo is insanely good, and would allow you to create almost anything with great efficiency....but that performance cap really does limit what you can accomplish. Looking forward to seeing if V17 starts to turn that around
They lost my after 902 because I balked at the subscriptions. But it also seemed to be losing traction, or anyway mindshare. As a hobbyist, the relative lack of tutorials was an issue for me.
Thank you for choosing MODO as your theme. I look forward to reading your report again when MODO17 is released.
It still has the best poly modeling and UV tools, but that´s all. Hope to see it shine again.
Modo was such an innovative and exciting program back then. It was so ahead of the game with many of its features. Once Luxology sold out and Brad Peebler got fired it was game over. They just didn't know it yet. Another slow, painful death by corporation. RIP Modo.
I was so hyped by Modo around 2010. It is really unfortunate. It's also so sad how Foundry slowly, probably by accident, killed Mischief. That program was a really great breath of fresh air in drawing software.
I adore Modo, it's still my favorite modeler. I had to surrender my license for financial reasons but boy do I miss it. Blender (which I have huge appreciation for for being free and very capable) doesn't hold a candle to modeling with Modo. Modo truly spoiled all who used it.
I am curious what does MODO have in terms of modelling tools that other software doesn't? I hear this a lot from modo users, but none seem to really go into the specifics...
@@anab0licit’s hard to describe without using it but everything just works together super nice. For example one feature I love is the moveable work plane. Say you’re modeling a spaceship and want to put a bunch of details on a specific plane. In other softwares it could be a pain because you’d have to either rotate the ship along the plane and snap it to a viewport or rotate everything as you’re placing it. In Modo you just snap the work plane to the models surface and everything you put on follows in that new coordinate space. (It’s hard to describe but it’s so useful).
Also their modifiers are amazing. I haven’t used a software with such nice modifiers (aside from Houdini but that’s different).
There’s just a lot of little things that add up to the Modo experience and once you pick it up modeling becomes a joy.
@@s81n You mean snap to live surface in Maya?
I have to say, overall that's a really good video. You did your research and tried to be fair. I can nitpik with some things. It's been a roller coaster for Modo users. Once they were acquired by Foundry there was a bit of a culture clash between a Silicon Valley startup (Luxology) and what was essentially a Film VFX software vendor owned by a giant investment firm. Foundry didn't ever create their own software, they purchased in-house FilmVFX software and sold it commercially. It has been bought and sold a couple times since and I think is on their 3rd CEO since acquiring Luxology. Pretty much all but a couple of the old Lux folk are gone at this point. However, it's very much NOT dead. They release updates all the time, at a faster face than ever (every couple of weeks now). They have a new product manager and some new devs who are all great. I do think they need to address 'The Blender issue' - but so does every other 3D software company. Blender has all the advantages of a free open-source program with almost none of the weaknesses. They have full-time paid developers, they have access to commercial software plugins that goes through a bunch of workaournds and loopholes to NOT conform to the Open Source rules. At the end of the day, as much as some people love Blender it could be considered pretty anti-consumer. Yep, it's free. But very much not everybody wants to use it - even if you give it to them for free. They would rather pay to use something else. If all those 'something-else' options go the way of the dodo (like Clarisse just did) then Blender isn't really that great for consumers.
Respondeing to the last 2 lines > Why do you think so, Is it because of our own culuured mentality that if we pay for something it automaticaly has more value than something which is available for free, also the old narrative that Free/open source apps are mostly shit beacuse of obvious reasons But that does is changing as tech and ppl are evolving, ppl wants to contribute to open source more and prefer that but still It doesnt mean to replace some other codework but to be as an alternative and thrive towards becoming best and open source for Indie/small groups and in that endeavour, if it attarcts huge base from other software groups then that is just a consequence.
@@A.Shek_ Not sure I even understand your question, why do I think what, exactly? The last two lines are 'They would rather pay for something else'. That's simply a factual statement, not an opinion. The last line (I won't re-write it) is an opinion about having more choices is better than fewer choices. Something I think most people would agree with. Do you really think I feel that software is only valuable if you pay for it? Does that seem like a position a normal person would take? Or is that the epitome of a straw man that you seem eager to argue against?
@Pixelfondue I think over the years it's been easily observable that the price of software and the basic tools that they provide is no longer worth the cost comparably to when you can achieve just the same with something free like Blender. Sure, to get a more premium experience you can pay for addons, but that cost is nowhere close to a yearly fee or even a maintenance cost for that matter. Even without addons and talking plain modeling, people jumped ship because of simple things that took too long for Foundry to update in Modo, like incorrect miter in bevel operations and the rounded edge shader having artifacts. The 'procedural modeling tools' being called a feature, when it's a poorly executed modeling/modifier stack system hacked together. On and on... there's no value in that.
Even Tor Frick has been exploring Blender, despite I heard him in his streams in the past talking shit on it saying, "Tsk tsk tsk, Blender blender blender.." in a dismissive tone, and now it's even become more worth his time to learn and work with. Foundry messed up big not capitalizing and marketing Modo for game dev with Tor Frick.
I mainly quit MODO after 10 because it become palpably apparent that the developers no longer had the support and ownership stopped caring. There's a reason that even MODO's own community laughs at the poor marketing and development priorities and has dubbed the software as a 'professional shoe modeler'.
@@sepigraph yeah, lot of truth in there. Modo is lacking on a few front, biggest being speed and price. Needs to be a lot faster and imo a LOT cheaper. It's still unique enough some people will prefer to use it - but it will never be like Blender.
It took me some time to get used to Modo, but once I got over that, I didn't look back. I still use it to this day. Modo does innovate in a lot of areas. Round edge shaders as normal maps for hard surface models was what initially got me in like, 7 years ago. And now you have curve booleans. The primitive slice is looking greater than ever! Everything to make modeling less of a chore, I see happening in Modo. Not to mention, best-in-class UV tools to which probably RizomUV might be the only competitor in the market.
Modo's stack-based rigging system is something that no other tools have. Rich Hurrey speaks a lot about this. And I do see great animation tools esp for the export of poses and actions separately in one file, which is incredibly useful for game dev. Sad that all these are not realized or marketed as such.
Everyone says Blender can do it all. Sure it can, but the user experience using that thing, for me at least, was the worst ever. The best part about Modo is that it just takes a click or 2 to get something that usually takes 4-6 clicks in any other software. Which makes it one of the best tools to use for working with 3D.
It's great to see you have done this video about Modo. For now, Modo is alive and a new version has been (silently😅) released every year. Anyway, I have seen changes in the last year that gave me a new hope about the development. Also, I think most people and users underestimate the "shoe" thing that happened to Modo. Modo is widely used in this industry as far as I know, and I saw recently a few job openings for different big brands where it was the only DCC mentioned. Probably without that segment, modo wouldn't be able to survive. Lightwave didn't look outside the media and entertainment industry and fell down much worst than Modo.
If I had a lot of money, I would repurchase the software from the Foundry and rebuild Modo from the ground up.
I did professional archviz and product viz for years with Modo. FANTASTIC program. Probably still the best traditional hard surface modelling toolset ever, and the render engine was very solid, too.
Eventually, when I switched to doing more coding and less art, I stopped updating. After being several editions behind and hearing great things about Blender 2.8, I started learning Blender instead. Nowadays, I use Blender because of the amazing community support it has and, well... it's free. But I still have a great deal of fondness for Modo, and do still occasionally miss a feature here or there.
I learned 3D on Modo, the interface when compared to max and maya was so clean and intuitive. When blender had its UI overhaul, I felt they were deeply inspired by Modo (which in turn was later replicated by C4D).
I was the Lead Artist at Naked Sky Entertainment in the first game projects, and was responsible for bringing Modo in as our central 3d tool for combining multiple modeling, optimization, texture, and baking workflows. As President of SpinCycle Animation and then iXL Animation we had worked with the Lightwave guys for years for KidsWB! and others, and I was a very early beta tester on pre-release Modo and was also a presenter for them at the NAB conference. Good memories and powerful tools. I still use it sometimes, but not as often as I once did.
What did you guys move onto?
Good story! But do you mourn its passing, was it dearly missed, do you wish for a comeback?
@@Ab19647 maha
Two things happened. Brad left. Modo forgot its name (MOD(eling)O).
The Modo developers are paying high attention to the instability problems and are doing some architectural changes to address that. Personally, I think it was because the architecture to combine Lightwave's Modeler and Layout, which was one of the factors to create Modo in the first place, needed to be thought out for scalability and adapt to newer CG demands. It was risky, to be sure. Besides all that is true about Modo from the market perspective, it's still a great software overall. It's also an underrated motion graphics package with MeshOps.
I am getting back into 3D as a hobby after being completely out of it for about 12 years now. Decided to look into Modo, it's been so long. Went to their webpage and see they are using a subscription model for pricing. NOPE, not doing that ever again. We need to stand up for ourselves as consumers. The subscription model is fine for large companies, but it's the honor system, and after too many no-fixes from Autodesk on their subscriptions, along with their half-arsed new feature implementations, I will never willingly be a subscription customer again. You spend far more over the long run than if you just buy the software and use it for years. I do miss the days when Alias's Maya and Softimage were competing against Autodesk, those were some good times, especially when XSI went mainstream. Then Autodesk came in like a wrecking ball and ruined all of that. How that company has not been broken up as the world's biggest 3d software monopoly is a mystery to me. On the subject of Modo, the learning curve was pretty high, it's not that intuitive compared to Maya or XSI, but it produced excellent results in the hands of experienced users.
It's a bummer, because every time Blender comes out with some AMAZING features, it's a feature Modo already had. But the problem is, no one knows. Modo needs to come out with more training materials. Pixel Fondue does a great job, but that's pretty much it. They need more tutorials to show off all the cool things it can do.
That's the wrong way to look at it. Modo had some features that Blender lacked, but they were often poorly designed or rushed, and then ignored. Blender's EEVEE was 1000% better than Modo's AVP, which was limited in what it could show you without actually doing a render. Blender pushed sculpting to the point where Zbrush users actually switched to use it, while that would never have happened with Modo's very limited sculpting feature set. What ultimately carried modo was its original modeling toolset and workflow, while many of the areas that showed promise were ignored (sculpting, texture painting, viewport..etc), and the new stuff rushed or poorly designed. I mean the bevel in Modo was broken for so long, while Blender fixed theirs right away.
@@deuswulf6193 Blender has things modo needed, but from my standpoint it's always Blender that's seemed poorly designed. The UI is so clunky with it's counter-intuitive key binds.
@@ronaldbell7429 There are two aspects to this, both of which are true.
Modo's "new features" past a certain point (around the time Luxology sold out to The Foundry), were either poorly designed or rushed and thus half-baked, but included anyway in order to check some boxes.
Blender started as a poorly designed application, yes, and they had a ton of criticism over the years for this, up until 2.8 at least. That started to change with some skillful people contributing to the UX. Unfortunately, its not application wide, but focused on key areas.
Blender is not as smart as Modo started out as being, but with the GUI layout change, 3rd party addons and automation (many are game changers), and industry standard control scheme, this changed. Call it steps forward in good design, while Modo was taking steps backwards.
When discussing intuitiveness, that's based on how familiar it feels to the user. I would not call Modo intuitive unless you make some changes right after booting up the software, that being turning off track ball rotation, hiding the work plane, and switching keymap.
Blender, likewise requires one to use the industry standard keymap, which is surprisingly similar to Modo's Maya keymap. Uses the same 1-4 keys to switch between components, QWER for the object, rotation, scale..etc
Modo is also very clunky when it comes to the properties panel, it was one of the worst parts about Modo especially as more stuff was added, the space it was in became over crowded. While Blender was smart enough, even back in the early days, to break it up into sections and overlays, presented visually with icons and breaks in the GUI.
Modo might be better off now that a certain person finally took over the reigns, but the damage was done by some people who won't be named, and by the Foundry itself, which is a horrible company.
@@deuswulf6193 you are just argumentating against Modo's change to be a subscription only program. Blender only has what you said because it is Community Based software. You are comparing something Modo had YEARS before Blender with things Blender has today.
Part of the reason why Maya became the standard tool for 3d production was from the lessons that were learned from prior tools such as a kinemation, dynamation, and power animator. The developers of Alias|Wavefront built off of their knowledge from their previous tools. At the time, applications were broken into various components. Modeling tools and animation tools were separate. Alias|Wavefront did a massive amount of R&D and came to the conclusion that the way forward for 3d production was interoperability. Modeling, animation, particles were no longer separate operations. The tools existed inside the same application and could share and use the same data sets. This also meant that there was a consistency to the UI across all aspects of the tool.
Modo caters to the niche lightwave user. Lightwave was a fine tool for its time but some of its workflows have become obsolete. Modo is a continuation of that lightwave design philosophy. This is why the menus and interface are inconsistent and at times incoherent. (Blender has this problem but they have made strides to remedy this problem) The modo developers actually see modo's lack of interoperability as a strength and not a weakness.
The other problem modo is facing is an aging user base. For modo to have a viable future as a production tool it needs an influx of new users. Modo needs an overhaul to face modern production problems. Modo developers should not be concerned with alienating the user base and just make the changes to modo that will empower users. Can modo change? Yes. Will it?. Hard to say, the developers will have to fight their core user base on updating and fixing modo to meet today's production challenges. And there are a variety of reasons why this might not happen.
Some of the users that sell scripts and/or plugins for modo would rather modo not be updated.
Man, i started with Modo 301 and upgraded each single release until a few years after Foundry entered the game. But really, it was frustrating to find same bugs release after release and in last years each new release was celebrated as epic, but in reality with no noticeable enhancements from my point of view. It was nice anyway. And i still have it installed somewhere on my ssd.
Yo so good to have you talking on modo today, i was luncky enough to work thispackage at my last job, modo felt complex at first but after a while its really awesome. However i don't feel blender was a reason behind modo decline, but kostly modo itself modo 15 was supper buggy, couldn't handle large dense scene and used to crash alot. But the nail in the coffin was when render engine such as vray stopped their integration with modo. But still today i love it❤
One thing that is particularly unique to Foundry software is the AVP (Advanced Viewport), which ships in Modo. It looks better than the Maya 2.0 Viewport, and I think it supports raytracing as well using OpenGL! I'd argue it goes above what the Hydra Storm OGL render delegate has as well, which used to be the best till AVP came around.
They really dropped the ball with rendering. A few years ago, the modo renderer was really quick for a CPU system. But the March of GPU rendering couldn’t be stopped. Still a great renderer, but they should have fought for more integrations sooner
The one I remember is Caligari true space. I was using that in 1995. It was fairly easy to learn.
Still my main software for modeling is modo.:)
I'm a Modo user and what he says is true. It is a fantastic modeler but the Foundry just doesn't have the resources that AutoDesk has and they can't offer it for free like Blender. It's not their fault, they are getting squeezed between two powerful market forces. Luxology is addressing many bugs and improving performance but they will always face competition from two fronts, Blender and AutoDesk.
The real tragedy is the loss of Maya best competition, softimage. That software was key learning how to model. But it was bought and liquidated by the autodesk monster. RIP softimage. 😢
rip softimage. thats partly why i gravitated towards modo. it had the same clean interface in a way. i often wish modo would grab some things from it (nurbs)
After Autodesk killed softimage, I got out of the 3d business. Maya and 3ds Max are both overpriced crap, Modo is lightwave+ with an absolutely idiotic texturing system, and Blender is a kids toy made by people who don't understand how a 3d program should work. I picked up Cinema 4d, but it just couldn't compare to the ease and power of Softimage and the Texturing system is also pretty retarded.
Always sad when the market shrinks a little.
I still use Modo. It's a good piece of software!
I started using modo in its early beta, when the software engineer on the stage proudly said "modo's rendering engine is called 24 hours engine, not because it takes 24 hours to render, but I coded it in 24 hours." I was amazed by the team's genius. That was a decade ago.
I think you mean TWO decades ago ;)
@@AlphaGeekgirl OMG, time flies! You're right.
Ah, I seriously loved Modo, and was right there with version 102, up to 10. Great toolset! I gave up on it though, pretty soon after the Foundry bought it. Instability issues were abound, and they introduced a subscription model (*shakes fist at SaaS*) which was confusing, and ultimately too expensive for me. I don't blame Brad (Peebler) for getting out... he'd put his whole life into Lightwave, then Modo. But for a little while, it really felt like a family. Lots of great support, no stupid subscriptions, continuous development. Fun with a capital 'F'. Oh, and I was one of those users who really loved the layers-based material/texturing system. It felt like Photoshop. Well, a bit, anyway.
What stopped me using Modo? At around the same time that I was becoming increasingly disillusioned with Modo/Foundry, Blender came out with 2.8. Game-changer. Haven't looked back.
there are free addons that do texture layers in blender FYI
@@wikittywhacktv Ta!
I used Lightwave in the late 90s and early 2000s. It was the go to for tv animation before I switched to blender Lightwave, C4D and Softimage was the softwares I like more than Max and Maya. They were easier to use versus Max and Maya which was a convoluted mess. I remember MODO but it never seemed to pick up steam like Max or Maya did just like people thought Rhino would for industrial design.
You know that LW is back with new ownders?
@@MarquisDeSang It's still outdated garbage.
Saying Blender killed Modo is plain wrong. It is a big factor in it's decline, but there are others two. Modo just struggled to find it's dominant industry (i.e. Maya with Film & Animation, Max with ArchVis & Games, Houdini with VFX, C4d with Motion Design), and they went all in on the Shoe design market and that didn't work out. Not enough people designing shoes I guess. Foundry are now positioning Modo back as a General 3D tool to help with the influx of 3d the metaverse has been promising, so the next couple of years will be key to it's future. Most forget, but Modo was a early player in the Indie licencing model, they just went too restrictive (as is the Foundry way). There's rumours of a shakeup in this space, so lets see what happens and hopefully it gets in the hands of more artists, as Modo is really a great tool and doesn't deserve to be shelved.
0:26 - BLENDER BONK !!!
Stick with using Blender - or else ... you will get bonked.
LOL
Sensible reply. They're actually looking at a new NC license and put out a survey recently, fingers crossed
Blender hasn’t killed Modo… it helped but The Foundry gave it the killer blow.
Long time modo user here. Used it from v1 to v12 before ultimately switching to Blender. There were several things that caused people to jump from the modo ship. While performance was one of them, the main one, it seems, was Foundry's pricing and move to a maintenance/subscription model. Modo became cost-prohibitive for many indies and who wanted to financially support a software that was quickly falling behind the development of the other 3D software, especially Blender? With the move to subscription, development seemed to slow even more with certain bugs languishing for months and, in some cases, years. And while modo remains a great modeling tool, there were other parts of the software that felt abandoned.
Used Modo since 701. I loved it.
Then the Foundry bought them out, and it was all down hill from there.
Blender since 2.8+
Not bad! This is a decent breakdown of what happened. As a MODO user, from my perspective, it was the unstable and sluggish performance of MODO that really killed it for me. The Modeller is easily still the best in the world. But the developers never could get past the issues of instability or sluggishness. Which seemed to indicate it was a foundational issue (perhaps?). Your breakdown of Blender also shows the brilliance of blender's development and how such a program which was belittled intentionally is now turning heads with it's raw power. I am now embroiled in learning blender. Yes, it's clunky compared to MODO and yes, it's going to take some serious muscle memory development but it is beginning to sink in. At least I am not winching every time I push a button to execute, expecting the inevitable crash. So yeah pretty bang on! However, I still choose to model in MODO... no reason not to. Blender is a very powerful option and well worth getting to know. But MODO, when it's working as expected is still to this day... Poetry in motion. ; )
I self-learned on Google Sketchup, went to college to learn Autodesk Maya, and my first job in the industry landed me on Modo. Loved it so much that I hold a personal license now. I have tried to migrate over to Blender so many times, but the keypress-to-execute timing for a lot of Blenders commands is too long. I should be able to just press W and have my transition tools. I shouldn't need to hit 2-3 buttons to do BASIC commands.
Sad but true. The steady decline of Modo is infuriating. Foundry is pretty trash. Now Modo is falling behind and it is severely overpriced for what little Foundry invests in it. User since 302 here, but I stopped pumping more money into this black hole last year.
The problem is The Foundry. After the Foundry bought, it never integrates Modo with NUKE, MARI, and Katana. The development of Modo is slow. Therefore, it can't bring any impact to 3D artits and the insdustry. I love the modeling concept of Modo and Silo at the beginning. Over time, autodesk realized the same concept into their products. Modo and Silo lost their unique features. Finally, Blender replaces the position of Modo. I start to make Blender like Modo and Maya with Add-ons.
I remember everyone thinking Modo would finally get good texturing improvements with the help from the Mari devs, nope. They let the modo texturing rot so you had to move over to Mari, and then the cost for that was not something a indie would normally pay for.
sad to say, Foundry bought it from Luxology. I miss the Luxology days when the community was so alive.
If only Blender was half as intuitive and zen as Modo...
Modo investers and finance plan pump up millions of $ in the development per year specielly in the beginning and like in blender some steps back happens in the devevelopment & test phases like in blender...
What the blender devs. and comunity established with a fraction of money with a open design and share philosophie is a absolut milestone of
2d 3d software history ..
Eh, Blender 2.8+ was heavily inspired by Modo. It should be intuitive since they are more similar than different.
Blender and Modo both have terrible interfaces.
@@MAGAMAN Care to explain what makes them terrible? Their interfaces are what make them generally better than the competition, generally speaking. The fact they have "rooms" or spaces which can leverage specific needs work really well, and everything else is basically a copy of every other major application.
Modo post foundry acquisition was generally a downward spiral of bad design choices, where as Blender was the opposite.
Yep blender interference is horrible
my team got modo as a presentation topic. this video really helps thank you man 🙏🙏
Well, i am a new Modo user and i am very happy with it and the new features and updates are getting better and better, and they are fixing bugs very fast pushing point releases, as for now we have Modo 16.1 v5 , and i am excited for the upcoming Modo 17 release which will be mainly focused on performance, and to talk about Blender and Modo and their user base respectively like that, it's not fair, yes Blender is a great 3D software, but to be honest most of it's user base is because it is free, make it 1500$/year subscription plan and no body will touch it again, many Blender users believe that Blender will become an industry standard , in my opinion that's impossible, why? take Windows, Mac, and our great free and open source operating system "Linux", Linux market share is probably 1% or so, despite being better than Windows or Mac ("technically"), do the math or the business logic, you will get to the conclusion.
Linux is not one product though, there ae many variants that work against consumer uptake. But Linux is the king when it comes to servers. That is where it excels and best suited, and it shows.
0:26 - BLENDER BONK !!!
Stick with using Blender - or else ... you will get bonked.
LOL
Modo is based on a flawed, text based file system, just like lightwave. It will always be slow and buggy.
That's what Modo 17 is starting to address. It sounds like they are progressively working their way through major re-writes.@@MAGAMAN
Recall modo fondly, i dabbled with the demo here and there. I used to frequent the luxo forum. Their modeling tools were solid.
Sad to see MODO losing its presence in the industry, It's such a fast modeler. Once Autodesk killed Softimage XSI, MODO was the software I moved to since for me it was the only software that could match it's modeling speed, and neat tools Softimage had (not counting ICE obvs). Nowadays all I really do is organic sculpting in Mudbox so I don't really need heavy duty 3D software so Blender is now the wave for me to just to make basic objects to be sculpted, and UVs. Shame, Modo is still super cool I just can't really justify £70ish a month for it.
for 10 year I use Modo, but mmm now blender is my software I dont like blender no I dont, but is powerful and kinda easy, hope MODO returns to the old glory
Modo was one of those foundational stone softwares that contributed immensely. Making an artist feel like they can do something is the biggest challenge. Naturally when they get better they want more complex softwares, and the past is forgotten. But such softwares define what can we called a ‘workflow’ (how to approach an art making process) and Modo was one of such for me.
The one thing that drew me to Modo was the user interface. It's amazing how many of the main 3D software we use for modeling have uninspiring UI. Blender has come a long way, but I've always believed that Blender's tools and software stability with Modo's UI design would make the ultimate 3D software. Modo is simply beautiful.
I've been using Modo since 301. This is all sadly true. Nevertheless it's still my #1 tool for non procedural modeling and UV.
Despite of this decade long decline, I truly hope that it will catch up with others someday. I'm still a Modo guy :)
The only way that can happen is if they overhaul Modo to have a refreshed look (partially because it will draw people who are willing to give it another look, just like Blender did with 2.8+). The other thing they have to do is go back to the basics, make a cheap and affordable tool with a perpetual license, focus it on game dev rather than shoes. It was so stupid for Modo's leadership at the time to focus on shoes, which was a niche market even in product design. Get the community AWAY from the stupid Foundry forums, which are now dead anyway.
I doubt the Foundry will ever let any of that happen though, they are stiff and corporate. They would rather let it die out and harvest the parts, or sell it off entirely.
I have been faithful to Modo since 501.
I Have Blender in my toolset but its Really clunky to model with Modos Workplane always Brings me back, Blenders Cursor is not the same this is coming from someone who originaly came from Blender.
Lightwave is back, 2023 version and new owners…. And that almost died but its come back - so there is hope for Modo
I enjoyed Modo. I learned with 3ds max so Modo was easy to pick up and start using. I had to cut costs and since it was a hobby i didnt renew my subscription for it, thinking blender will work fine.
I dread using blender so much, I barely model any more. Its so unintuitive i have to pretty much relearn how to use it everytime.
Modos updates add features i want to use where as blenders seem like gimmicks im not interested in.
Sadly modo keeps increasing the price and no longer sell perpetual licenses.
in 2016 Foundry started in Brazil a witch hunt... All independent artist, who tagged modo in their behance, or something like that, portfolio, received a contact from Foundry to buy the software, to became legal, but Here in Brazil the softwares are too expensive for an independent artist. So it was a massive run to take the tagg off, or migrate to Blender. So, those who used a pirate version, but spread the propaganda of modo, has left.... and all the agencys and companys, who has the money for license, had to change software becaouse there was no more artist who worked with modo... then the modo died in Brazil.
I think Luxology sold out to the Foundry because they kept losing money, despite Brad Peebler being a great inspiring personality to have as head of a 3d SW company. Modo was cool, exciting and had a beautiful interface and viewport, but was almost impossible to use because of constant crashes. I remember having to switch my project from Modo to 3ds Max so I could complete it on time.
I also started with modo 302 and after trying Maya, 3DS, Lightwave, and a few other lesser known apps I found modo and it changed my life, Literally. It actually got me to change careers for a little while and I loved it. Over the years I moved away from 3D modeling but recently wanted to get back into it so I got the latest version of modo, specifically for the MeshFusion tools. I could barely get through 5 minutes without it crashing to desktop when trying to do the most basic operations. The workflow and the results I was getting were very different from even the latest tutorials and documentation.
It felt completely alien to me. That on top of a subscription model? It pains me to say it but modo is just a part of my history at this point.
The last 3 years I haven’t been modeling as much, but all tried to use it a few times starting with MeshFusion and frustrated when it was easy to crash while trying to explore with it.
Unfortunately many of us just got an email from The Foundry regarding Modo Maintenance. They are officially announcing it has officially ended, or winding down, development and pretty my much over following the release of 17.1 later this year. 😢
@@TimothyBH123which version do you think is the most stable?
it's sad, because i would say that modo has one of the best modeller in the market. Great selection tools i miss very often in Blender. Performance was not bad until you try to animate things. But this was not the main Problem. Since foundry bought it, the whole software seemed to me like abandoned. The development slow, many bugs were not fixed, new ones appear. And at the end of the day, the expensive licenses. Expensive and unflexible. All this played a part. Same with lightwave, which i used as one of my first 3d software before i switched to softimage. Many good technologies disappear, because of bad management, wrong marketing decision and also primitive greed.
I started with Lightwave in the 90’s then moved to Modo to model. I still have the 1.0 retail box in fact. I too cheered for it’s intuitive interface. I even got the school I taught at to buy a pile of licenses and ended up teaching it for a few years. Blender updated and turned into the ender of my relationship with Modo at version 15. I still speak fondly of it and miss many of the very well designed features and layout. Now Blender is my daily driver and Modo feels like a classic car collecting dust in my garage. Some days I use it for the sake of nostalgia, but I feel so rusty at it.
it was a really powerful software with good minimal redering time. Only that there are few tutorials online because of few users
I loved Modo but when it was sold to The Foundry and the subscription and pricing increases started to become a little too much I gave up and switched to Blender. I blame not only the Foundry but also the management team-they just didn't seem to know act they heck they were doing and the marketing really became pretty terrible-and the upgrading price. Too sad...I spent years learning this software and it was good in its day.
Thank you for this. I've been unplugged from the modelling world for a long time and honestly wasn't aware how far it had fallen. Modo was orignally a joyous return to my modelling roots with Lightwave, before delving into Maya and Softimage. Does anyone know why Foundry has been neglecting it?
Wish I knew the answer to that.
I got on the Modo wagon at the get go but finally had to say goodbye after 601. Great package when it wasn't crashing. Now mostly Lightwave with some Blender - like 'em both!
Modo got way more stable around 901. 601 was an utter mess.
@@EightNineOne I heard it has gotten better and I downloaded the 14 demo but was never able to get it activated and haven't bothered since. LW got better in the mean time and Blender is now amazing and very user friendly now since the changes to the UI. Modo has lost it's chance with me I'm afraid especially with the pricing the way it is.
@@TheLightWaveGuy I haven't touched Lightwave in quite a while, but I am curious to see if its new owners can turn things around. It is such a tough market now days.
@@alankott3129 We still use it at work so I am happy it will see updates/keep running with new hardware etc.. LW is just fine for what we do but I am enjoying using Blender in my spare time.
part of the problem is that once Modo penetrated the product design marketplace, Luxology moved their focus to that market and neglected other production-related advances for years.
It became the Shoe software.
Lol. Modo is still used by a lot of studios in both film and game industry. Blender did not kill Modo. Modo still has the absolute best UI and logical interface of any 3D modeling package. Modo is also fast and responsive and isnt a resource hog like many other 3D modeling packages. Blenders UI still sucks and still carries a lot of issues (even with the 3rd party reskins and addons available). And Blender has issues with hangups when it starts to chew away at resources.
Haha funny joke.
I love Modo's poly modelling and UV tools, but since my subscription expired last month I have been wondering if I should pay another $719/year and I simply can't justify this price tag. Please, keep in mind that I plan to get back to working for the Footwear Design industry and Modo would be the go-to software in this case. But I have been living in Brazil, with no fixed job or fixed income and the monthly minimum wage here is the equivalent to $285. Would you pay the equivalent of 2.5 months of work simply to use a software which doesn't even deliver a consistent flow of upgrades and lacks stability and rendering capabilities?
I really wish somehow Modo finds success in the future, and maybe I'll justify spending that much money in it once again. For now, believe it or not, my solution will be to go back to Modo Indie, and get good in Blender asap. It feels like I'm back in 2017, haha.
hilarious thumbnail.... yeah some artists swear by certain software. i got hip to softimage thru vitaly (of course) and he makes it look like the best 3d modeler ever. rene mitchell (won nvidia metropia 2042 contest) uses maya and swears by that. learned about modo from tor frick's article in vertexhd. I use blender. so many options i really feel like it's just preference and what you've been exposed to.
in the early days of Modo was a game changer for moddeling and development speed..
but the time moves on...
and the price tag is for companys okay
but for the single content producer it was always a big weak spot in the finance calculation ...
Blender have even again a long way to go to have that typ of tool arsenal in place..
the add on situation helps a lot these day to close the gap more or less...
At some point the value proposition for modo became atrocious.
I used lw3D and then modo since their very first versions, for years they were both cool softwares but since foundry acquired luxology they changed their economic model after some years, not only they took the subscription route but also raised the price for the upgrade, making it less and less useful for an hobbyist like me, so as many i decided to switch to blender even if lw and modo will still have a special place for me, foundry just made some bad decisions, in my opinion, that make their user base to flee. it's pity.
i used to use modo, i tried it briefly, but didn't go past version 10, which was one of the last perpetual versions i think. What attracted me to modo at first was the uv mapping system (which i found a lot better than max's or maya's back then), the boolean system, the kitbashing workflow and the dynamic unit measurement system, which showed you the unit scale of the scene in realtime in the viewport, and at which scale you were at depending on how close to the origin the camera was zoomed in, that's something i've not seen any other 3d package do.
Yes, it was the subscription licence that killed it for me.
I tried several years ago a trial version of Modo 3D. It had all the features but for only 30 days.
I really loved the interface over let say Maya. At that time also prefered the UI over Blender 2.79. But now Blender in many ways look like MoDo 3D.
Blender has been my favorite 3D software for several years. I doubt I will use another software for 3D in the future. Blender can do everything I need and it does it very well.
But this is just based on my own personally taste. I understand a lot of people would disagree.
Modo is still amazing, their main weakness is price (hard to compete vs "Free"), and maybe speed in large scenes (which is getting addressed in version 17).
Probably the best poly modeler out there, and incredible procedural capabilities if you can afford it, or were lucky to buy a perpetual license. Could also benefit from a free Indie version
I tried out Modo once Foundry started building a Nuke pipeline for it, around 2012 or so (maybe even earlier). I was really impressed by Modo's features and was dead sure it's gonna be huge. I wasn't that invested in 3D back then, so I always wanted "to get back at it". What eventually brought me into 3D was... well, the Blender 2.8 craze. I would have gladly given Modo another shot, but since it's not part of my Nuke subscription, well...
Modo is incredible piece of software, i hope it shine again someday
This video is trying to say too much about the topic without actual knowledge. They just did not pay enough attention to performance. Even though modo still has the most robust/capable modeling toolset, it just got impossible to handle ever increasing tri/tex counts of production environments. When the industry embraced 4k monitors, the performance took an additional massive dive. I was there going from fastest package to the slowest - it was in a way quite humiliating. Maybe Foundry took too much revenue and did not allow thorough maintenance builds. As modo is not really dead yet like the video suggests, it might still make a comeback because they are actually working on the performance now. If they manage to fix the performance, then nothing can deny the power of the modeling toolset.
I used and Loved Modo, but had to let it go. For me it was the low performance. On Complex Archi Scenes everything was just too slow. Shadertree had issues too which never seemed to be resolved after a few updates.
Wow.. amazing video bro.. I'll see this game..
There is nothing moving, no feedback, no enthusiasm, no vision, no passion, no leader. A software with a dead community is a death cult.
I remember using modo back in the day as a youngster, it's a shame what happened, but it is life 💔
sounds like profit motive killed it
I'm still using it :)
@@khellstr that's so cool!
I'm sorry too. I loved it and still do. But it seems to me that the world just passed them by and they really didn't want to notice. Now I'm learning Houdini and Blender. I still have a license for this year, when it expires I will decide whether to continue or not. I'll see how much continuous work I have left.
Worked with a bunch of 3d software over the years. Still using Modo. Tried Blender for a few months, made a couple of small personal projects. Simply didn't like it. As far as UX goes it felt like a steep downgrade. The fact that they dropped conformity to the VFX Reference Platform after only 2 years make me wonder if it really is the solution its trying to sell itself. So for me, Modo for modeling and UV and Houdini for everything else will still be the way of the land.
What is Houdini good for?
I just got into gamedev and modeling. So far only learning, Marvelous Designer and Modo.
But I’ve heard Houdini often
It is a very very sad moment for cg industry... Xsi devastated a lot of studios
In fact, modo is still an attractive package (especially for Blender users because, unlike the latter, it has an absolutely logical and systematized interface), but its real-time visualization system is full of bugs and simply cannot be normally perceived as a working one.
Brad Peeble left and ... Well i feel they lost momentum once they were bought by foundary. Like any big corp no need to inovate sonce there are just very few 3d software. Autodesk killed softimage. Niw we have maya, Houdini, blender, modo. For modeling zbrush, 3d coat.. done
It's a great piece of software. But... I was Modo user about 10 years. It's still great to do some homebrew projects. But it's absolutely unsuitable to handle the large scenes even with using of replicators on modern workstation with 13900K, 192Gb RAM and NVIDIA 4090 graphics card. It's like a slideshow. 3ds max works with these projects very easy on my workstation. Modo's developers ignored that problem for decades. That's why I gave up Modo few years ago.
Still love it. Cannot afford the maintenance as a hobbyist. Once the community was ignored the money dried up. Community is everything.
If you don't water it and give it sunshine it dies. Time to spin it off to some true believers.
2023, I am still using Modo
Modo is great and has made major improvements!! 16.1 is a game changer. 17 is due to release this summer and will be loaded with bug fixes plaquing all the way back to the 7 series. It will also be introducing new rendering (cycles render engine) and features. They are also making USD more available so third party companies can implement their engines into Modo a lot easier. Modo still has and always had the best modeling tools over any other software. listen in on the live streams with the devs so you can get an idea of the future for Modo, its nothing like how you claim it is lol. So much stuff has been improved and is still improving. Animation, Rendering, Modeling, etc are all being focused on and fixed which is the major focus in the 16 and 17 series.
Your comments, while obviously supporting Modo (employee/marketing exec?) do not address the comments. The key issue appears to be price in a saturated market and the subscription model. Fail to answer these and you won’t gain traction.
@@Watche777 The subscription is the issue IMO, perpetual pricing is only available for existing users. Which is awful.
Also the comment above about Cycles is conjecture, they're implementing hydra but no native renderer has been announced and there might not be one bundled with 17. That being said, I'd be kinda upset if Cycles was their end choice, it's a decent renderer but not one I'd like to see in a commercial product. Cycles' shortcomings would be a lot harder to ignore if I were paying for it.
One thing that IS coming in a non-commercial version, which hopefully will attract back some hobbyist users if they market it properly.
So this is the end of summer but no Modo 17
Yeah- Running off Allen Hastings and focusing on 3rd party renderers isn't a confidence builder. Allen was responsible for the Lightwave and Modo renderers and he wasn't the problem. The Foundry is just shooting themselves in the other foot here.
7:57 modern, OG, modern, aaaand...OG
Has foundry acquired anything that hasn't since died...
Even magix has done a better job of taking care of their acquisition's, which really is a low bar.
Sadly they closing modo
The Foundry happened. They ran it into the ground.
Great overview. I would add that to this day, Modo has no High DPI support. This is SUCH a PITA for experienced users... It must a complete show stopper for anyone that's trying Modo for first time. What's the point of having great, or even state of the art modeling tools if you can't see what you're doing? Even more sad, High DPI support has been on the 'road map' since about version 12. Watching the release video for Modo 17, I see that it's road map yet again. Though NOT as feature that will be released any time soon. It's road map to be worked on. They even admit that it won't be there for 17.1 and also that it won't be there for 17.2 . I don't know wether to laugh or cry. So sad. So ridiculous. 😥😥😥
I used Modo. It was a peerless 3D subdivision modeler
I like how you presented it all in the past tense. Sad isn't it?
Now on Modo is discontinued..
Fantastic video. The end is hilarious. Hahahahaha
Modo is still the best modeler...still using it!
Tbh, I think that is no longer true. Blender with the right addons, imo, has taken the throne.
It makes me so sad. I still use Modo for modelling as I still find enjoyable to model in. It was the software that opened the door for me and made me feel like I could make anything. But now it seems so far behind and increasingly feels dated. I use C4D for my final scenes and rendering as modelling in C4D still sucks. I've got high hopes for the modo 17, but this will be it's last chance, but I still worry for how long it will be supported.
I have to say vray dropping modo didn't help, those two were my go to. As others have mentioned the pricing is a big issue, especially for freelancers. Autodesk/Max had the sense to offer a reduced cost version for those earning under a certain amount a year (I don't know if they are still doing that), it would have been nice if the foundry had offered something similar.
Furthermore the renders I don't think are on the same level as Max and Cinema 4D with their various plug-in renderers. It kind of reminds me of the lightwave days, where what was being marketed was predominantly cartoon like material.