Thomas Ingham of Coalmarch Productions

Lux: How did you guys first get started with modo?

TI: We have a couple of people in the shop that have experience with 3d tools. Because we are a small shop, everyone ends up wearing a particular hat in any given project. One of my personal hobbies has always been 3d modeling. None of the packages I've used have provided the kind of experience in a stable environment where you can model and render and paint and do all the kinds of things that you can do in modo. When the pre-sale of modo version 1 burst on to the scene I was using Lightwave, and had been for a few years for both projects and attempting to keep my drawing skills sharp by modeling for fun. I decided to put in an order for modo v1 and see what happened. I was growing tired of Lightwave Modeler quickly, and thought it would be fantastic to replace just that part. Because the process was so slow for me working in Modeler and it's antiquated interface, I'd never really gotten to actually rendering out final products. This caused a vicious circle of non-completion that had kept my love for 3d to a hobbyist level. Since modo was released, I think I've opened Lightwave Modeler three times, once to see what a tool was called in Lightwave and another time to respond to a forum post about a LW question. The third time was probably because I accidentally hit a button in Layout and the Hub was trying to be helpful.

Lux: Why did you decide to use modo for this project?

TI: Since Coalmarch is primarily a web programming and internet marketing company, we knew that whatever budget we put together for this project would probably come up a little bit short as the more creative, art asset side of the project was a complete unknown. As such, everyone was a little gun-shy about where to put our dollars for development. After our initial creative team meeting, I headed back to my office getting ready to scour our photo resources to see if I could find materials to use to produce the scene composites as a series of collages. After about 20 minutes I got more than a little agitated because everything I was finding was either too small, not the right angle or just not the right mood. The AD and I were talking about what it would take to do one of the composites in 3D and whether or not we could just model pieces and render them at the proper angle to then include in the composite collage and I jokingly said something to the effect of "If that's all you need I could probably do that in an hour in modo." Well, needless to say that was a sort of gauntlet being thrown down. I sat back down and in an hour (or so) I had a fantastic rough of the "Kitchen" scene. Once we realized that we could do the scenes entirely 3D, it was a simple thing to justify that kind of performance against the budget. Each scene had probably two revisions, most of which were done in the original files during critique. The days of having a huge list of changes from the "art director" which need to be taken back to the cave for two days are gone. modo allows you to be creative and remain in concert with your team right now!

Lux: What was the biggest challenge in using modo?

TI: Most areas of production fall into two camps. Around 90% of the work that we do falls into the first camp; the situation is usually that something like what we're creating is just like twenty other things we've done and we just need a stable environment in which to create it. In this area you're not breaking any rules or sound barriers, you're just trying to get a fantastic looking image or piece of code or whatever out the door on time. The second 10% is where you're pushing the limits of the software and everyone is wearing their fingernails down worrying about whether or not it's going to work. I think that a common misconception with 3d software, or software development and probably any specialized sort of work is that it's incredibly complex and that the people who perform that work are addicted to pushing the limits. We find that more often than not we are fighting the stability of the software tools and end up having less and less time to produce fantastic and exemplary output. While this is a sad fact, with modo it's quickly fading into history. During the course of this project we had a modo crash on us once; instead of choosing "Bump" for a texture channel, I chose "Displacement" with the camera pulled in very close to the surface of my object to "See what would happen," and we got the rainbow cursor and had to force quit.

Lux: What are your favorite features in modo and/or which tools have you found most useful on this production?

TI: My favorite tool of ALL TIME has got to be the localized work plane alignment. After you've created your object on the origin, you position it with the Item mode selected and this throws the axis of the object all out of whack. Just tick the "Reference Layer" cell for that object layer and "Boom," you're working in that object space again. Oh, but wait, maybe it's the scripting language integration, or the macro recorder, or the dead-simple effectors and falloff system...And don't even get me started on the shader tree. There are so many great tools in modo that prove to the end-user that Luxology put a tremendous amount of thought into "How" people use their application and I'm sure that picking just one would only serve to diminish someone else's favorite. I love them all.

Lux: Was there anything about modo that surprised you?

TI: As a long-time modo user (as long as you can be with modo anyway) it's hard to say that anything about using the application was particularly surprising to me. One notable aspect of the software that did, however, wow everyone in the office was the checkbox for "Conserves Energy." The AD was sitting next to me saying that the surface of the table looked a little muddy, or too "racketball[ish]." I put the check-mark in the box and I think his exact words were...well you get the picture I'm sure.

Lux: How well did modo integrate with the rest of your production pipeline?

TI: Unfortunately I'm running a MacBook Pro and Photoshop is still not available as a Universal Binary. As such, I ended up using a couple of in-house tools for image preparation among other things and tried to keep my PS use to a minimum. The bottom line with the EmptyChambers project was that we just didn't need anything other than modo for production. I was able to model, texture, paint, light and render scenes, all within the environment. Because modo is so fast, no-one in our workflow was ever stuck or kept waiting on content from the software to finish their part in the project to continue. I can think of no better way for a piece of software to fit into a pipeline than to just be ultra-fast, and stable.