modo Animation

Modern animation tools in modo offer control and flexibility

modo 501 provides an animation system that combines a strong feature set with a modern user interface. With modo’s intuitive animation controls, you can produce animated product assemblies, architectural walkthroughs and motion graphics. You can also read in animation files from other systems and render character animation and dynamics in modo.

Animation Done Here

modo contains everything you need to make items in your scene vary their appearance, location or virtually any other parameter over time. This can be as simple as animating the time of day for a sunlight study or as sophisticated as rigging a complex mechanical assembly such as the retractable landing gear of an aircraft. Innovative user interface elements like the Heads Up control for adjusting channel values smooth the process of creating animations inside of modo. A Graph Editor and Trackview offer other useful ways to precisely control how items and their properties animate in modo. See the new visual connection editor for creating rigs in the modo 501 Feature Tour: Animation .

Vary Any Property

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 in order to make it visible or invisible at a point in time. Color coding in the interface lets you see which values have been keyframed. There are dozens of properties you can keyframe on an object to affect how it looks and where it is in space at a given time. To animate a camera, just keyframe its position by navigating normally in a camera viewport and adding keys on the desired frames. modo will smoothly interpolate between each camera position when you play back the animation. Of course, you can also keyframe other camera attributes such as lens focal length or on focal distance (for effects like a rack focus).

Big Rigs

New to modo is the ability to create sophisticated assemblies that are driven by just a few controls. For example, you can create a rotary engine that is driven by a single “speed” control or roll up a set of blinds by rotating a crank.

These assemblies leverage modo’s ability to link the channels of one item to another, and to apply constraints and modifiers to the rig. Inverse kinematics let you move the end of a 2 joint chain and dynamic parenting allows operations like the arm opening and then releasing a door. A system of modifiers let you, for instance, add a noisy camera “shake” for enhanced realism.

Organic Animation

You can animate between any number of morph deformations in modo (morphs are sometimes called blendshapes). In this way you could animate between a smiling face and a frowning face for example. You can also stress test your morphs before exporting to them to other 3D animation packages. You have the ability to animate vertex maps using deformers for subtle effects like vibration or secondary animation effects.

Import and Export Animations

modo is equipped to read and write COLLADA files, a new standard for the exchange of model and animation data. modo can also read .MDD files to render animations created in other 3D applications. Handy tip: Point Oven (not included with modo) is a commercial suite of plug-ins designed to bake vertex and fcurve data into MDD files and is available for several popular 3D animation software packages.

Render It Out

When it comes to producing your final rendered sequences, the modo is ready to render animations that are rock steady and free of flicker and noise crawl. A special walkthrough mode for scenes with global illumination not only steadies the resulting animation but also improves rendering efficiency from frame to frame. Utilize motion blur to produce smooth results for fast moving objects like spinning propellers or industrial robots.

Animation Workflow Examples

 

See more animation video tutorials at Luxology.tv.

Animation Samples

 

See more animation video tutorials at Luxology.tv.

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