VizWorld.com

While personally I wouldn’t consider jogging with an infant’s stroller, industrial design firm phil&teds has made a pretty good living out of designing children’s products for use by ‘active parents’, and their latest creation is the “World’s Fastest Jogger”, a children’s stroller specifically designed for jogging, modeled and designed in modo401.

“At phil&teds we don’t like to muck around with projects in the hope that we will invent something fantastic over time,” said Brace. “We always test the waters in advance to reduce risk, but in this case, visualizing the final product in modo told us most of what we really needed to know. I can honestly say that modo is the best of the many software solutions I have used over the years.”

Read the full release after the break.
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Graphics design, modo, modo401, phil&teds

A new press release from Luxology and Tripwire Interacative reveals that upcoming WW2 FPS “Red Orchestra: Heroes of Stalingrad” uses Luxology’s modo401 to model the environments and weapons used in the game.

“modo has proven to be essential in our art pipeline; its grid snapping and alignment tools are very handy in blocking out levels and creating modular pieces for the in-game environment,” says David Hensley, art director at Tripwire Interactive. “The end result was that we were able to create a game that was feature-rich and visually compelling. I can’t imagine life making video games without modo on my computer.”

If you’re at GDC, you can stop by the Intel Booth (#1212) and check out a demo.

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Graphics luxology, modo401, tripwire, video game

Those of you working in Mechanical Engineering Design might want to pay close attention to this new press release from Luxology that includes quotes from Stuart Brown and Paul McCrorey, two mechanical designers who use Luxology’s Modo401 and SolidWorks PhotoView360 to render their models with startling detail.

Recently, a client who wanted a custom car asked Stuart to create a virtual wooden render of a buck, which is a wooden rig used to help make automobile bodies. After using Solidworks 2010 and PhotoView 360 to realize the buck and then modo 401 for final visualization, Stuart says, “The results showed an incredible visual performance increase, to the extent that I am often asked whether the picture I am showing a client is real or computer-generated.’

In addition to simple rendering, they also extoll the virtues of the mapping and animation tools.

Later importing his model into modo 401 for finishing, Paul says modo’s range of control was much greater than he expected: “For texturing, I used UV mapping to establish the fabric pattern on the back seat of the wheelchair. Displacement mapping was used to generate the treads on the tire. With the rich visualization and animation toolset provided in modo, the possibilities are truly endless. Features like morph maps and vertex weight maps were new to me but proved critical for realistic cloth movement. I used the constraint tools to precisely define the wheelchair’s folding action. Finally, the gradient editor provided extreme flexibility in timing of the animation.”

See some more examples of their fantastic work.

via Luxology Press Release: SolidWorks PhotoView 360 and Luxology’s modo 401 Open New Doors for Mechanical Engineering Designers.

Graphics design, luxology, modo, modo401, solidworks

Seen all the hype about modo401 but haven’t been willing to plunk down the cold hard cash to check it out?  No longer a problem, thanks to a free 15-day trial now offered by Luxology.

This is a no frills introduction to modo, useful for testing modo on a particular set of hardware, for example. The modo software is included with documentation for a fifteen day evaluation period.

In addition to the free 15-day trial, they’ve got a $25 “Production Evaluation” option which includes a 30-day trial, Rhino Translator, SDK, and more.

via Luxology > Try modo.

Graphics beta, free, luxology, modo, modo401, software

A new tutorial from Vincent Rice shows the capabilities of modo401 for reformatting badly-tesellated CAD models.

modo 401 is an excellent tool for ‘re-toplogising’ 3D CAD data. That is, the re-purposing of hi-density mesh created on export from NURBS-based engineering programs into a form (subdivision surfaces) useful for high-quality stills and animation rendering. Here’s a simple tutorial to show how I usually approach this task.

via tutorials.

Graphics cad, models, modo, modo401, tutorial

Luxology has announced the Modo Asset Sharing site where users can upload and download special material and asset sets for use in the new Modo401 tool.

Luxology > Share > Asset Sharing.

Graphics luxology, modo, modo401

Experienced Modo user Marc Hermitte sat down with the new Modo401 and compared it to the previous Modo302.  He found that it’s slightly slower, simple scenes went from 21.25s to 22.75s in his tests, but the new features more than make up for this minimal impact to rendertimes.

Numerous new features have been added in the render department  :

Better motion blur (Anti Aliasing up to 256 sample/pixel), stereoscopic rendering, shadow catcher shader, selective radiosity type (per surface) which allows  hybrid global illumination scenes setup,  volumetric lighting (with deep shadow map option to speed up the rendering of such effects), lights linking (inclusion / exclusion), new anisotropy mapping, blurry refractions and much more.

via Review Modo 401 by Marc Hermitte.

Graphics modo, modo401, review, software