modo Animation

Animate with Expression and Control in modo

Animating in modo comes naturally as the modeling and animation tools work hand in hand. The same tools used in modeling are directly leveraged in the animation system. As you create in modo, time is just another dimension for you to draw upon. Use modo to create precise mechanical animations or fully articulated skinned characters.

Animate Anything

Animation is so deeply integrated into modo that you can animate virtually any characteristic of your scene. Setting a keyframe is as simple as moving to the frame you want and using Add Key after you have adjusted, for example, the opacity of an object to make it become visible at just the right moment. To create a simple walk-thru animation, just navigate normally in a camera viewport, adding keys as you go. modo will smoothly interpolate between each camera position when you play back the animation.

You are the Director

Ready access to the right tools provides you with exquisite control when you animate in modo. You have familiar curve-based control over how modo interpolates values between keyframes so that you can direct objects to smoothly glide a stop or to abruptly jump to a new position to emulate the jerky movement of the second hand on a clock. If you want the property of one item (for example, speed) to drive the property (say, rotation) of another, you visually connect their two channels in a connection editor. You have both the artistic and mathematically precise controls needed to animate with impact and accuracy.

Character Animation

Posing a character in modo works exactly as you’d expect. Pull the hand of a character to a new position and the shoulder and arm adjust their positions too. Twist the torso and the upper body adjusts. When you get the pose you want, save it and use it at any point on the timeless or later modify it further. Visible motion paths let you see the arc of say, a tennis swing, right in your scene. Deformers, morphs and weight maps let you add expression to your models as they move. You can build up multiple actions for your actor at a given point in time and switch between them to compare.

 

Reusable Rigs

modo provides the tools for you to create reusable animation assemblies or rigs that can be used by others with simple on screen controls. These rigs can be as a simple as a wall clock with a user settable start time, or as complex as a dragon that will open its jaws to reveal its teeth differently in accordance with an onscreen slider labeled "Ferocity". In modo you have all the ingredients to construct both mechanical and organic rigs that provide simplified control for the animator during production.

Precise Controls

A system of action centers, pivots and locators give you highly granular control over how elements in the scene will rotate and move in response to inputs. The motions can be further modulated by applying mathematical functions without keyframing, to impart a subtle trembling motion when the jaw of a character is opened very wide for example. A system of Constraints let you drive animated behavior based on geometric relationships in your scene like the distance or angle of one object to another. Deformers let you change the shape of objects right down to the vertex level for effects like squishing a tire, puffing up cheeks or rippling a landscape with a shock wave.

Render Your Animation

The modo renderer is ready to render your animation as a series of frames or directly to a movie file. Importantly, the modo renderer is time-aware and will render animations that are rock steady and free of flicker and noise crawl. You can utilize motion blur to produce smooth results for fast moving objects like spinning propellers or industrial robots. With built-in network rendering, modo is there for you from start to finish.

See more animation video tutorials at Luxology.tv.

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