MODO Rendering

Rendering in MODO is not just for final output, it is your partner in the creative process, delivering interactive updates as you work.

MODO 701 is equipped with one of the world’s great renderers for creating gorgeous images and animations – and for baking out everything from HDRI files to textures for game engines. The Luxology renderer is provided as both a final render engine and as an optimized Preview Renderer that updates nearly instantly as you model, paint or change any item property within MODO. The renderer is an over-achiever that offers that rare blend of speed and quality, and is licensed for network rendering.

Seriously Fast

The MODO render engine is fast, with the ability to render our trillion polygon detail at enormous frame sizes. MODO can render print resolution files (e.g. 20K x 20K) using as many cores as you have on your workstation. Under the hood, the MODO renderer is a fast ray-tracer that uses high dynamic range radiance units throughout its calculations for maximum accuracy and quality. The renderer is highly scalable on multi-core systems, delivering nearly linear speedups as more processors are added. The renderer’s innately fast performance is a combination of very tight code and a unique front-end that decouples many key computations, thus allowing for a finely tuned balance between memory use, speed, and quality.

Preview Renderer

The MODO Progressive Refinement Renderer is a constantly rendered view of your scene which lets you immediately see the effect of every modeling, lighting or material change as you work. If nothing is happening in the scene, the Preview Renderer will progressively render to final quality. You can even pause the refinement, save the state and load it up to continue the refinement at a later time. This is a game-changing way to work, for you are essentially doing hundreds of test renderings as you model or change the light or material properties of your project. By the time you kick off a final render, you know exactly what it is going to look like. Maybe you will simply use the progressive refinement to get you to final image quality with less hassle. The Preview Renderer also gets you familiar with how every parameter in MODO affects your final rendering because you can see each individual change as it is made.

Production Ready

In addition to final color output, the renderer can produce a wide variety of individual render outputs and be used to bake over thirty results (like geometric normals, diffuse shading, ambient occlusion) into image maps. A Constant Alpha option lets you easily create mask elements for compositing work. To save your work, a wide range of output image formats are supported including layered PSD files, layered OpenEXR or a series of PNG files for example. Renderings you have created are conveniently stored as thumbnails in the Render View so you can easily access different iterations and even compare them to one another with a an adjustable A/B splitter. A complete Render Pass system lets you save and apply named collections of rendering settings (for example “draft” or “sunset”) as a standard part of the rendering operation. Field and stereoscopic rendering are also fully supported.

Accurate Lighting Models

Global illumination and physically-based shading models are available, providing for advanced optical phenomena such as anisotropic blurry reflections, caustics, dispersion, blurry refraction and subsurface scattering. MODO includes Physical Sky and Physical Sun rendering for accurate sunlight at any location as well as support for photometric lighting through the IES standard. Volumetric lighting for light shafts with Deep Shadows is supported. Light linking allows you get the right amount of light in every part of your scene and standard lighting rigs are included in the many Presets that come with MODO.

Surface and Subsurface Realism

The MODO renderer is capable of trillion polygon renderings with astonishing detail. Micropoly tessellation at render time delivers effects like skin, terra cotta pottery or highly fractured terrain with greatly heightened believability. MODO Replicators deliver additional depth and detail by letting you distribute almost limitless numbers of geometry (or billboard images) such as pebbles, trees, barnacles or thorns to your renderings.

Anisotropic highlights and support for Fresnel reflections deliver realistic metallic surfaces and correct reflections and refractions at any angle to the camera. You can texture the blurry reflection anisotropy direction for materials like carbon fiber. And beneath the surface, transparency absorption automatically considers subsurface density for realistic portrayal of coral reefs and tropical lagoons Or apply depth-controlled subsurface scattering to get realistic skin, or wax.

Special effects

Volumetric rendering in MODO lets you create smoke and clouds. A Skin shader delivers realistic human skin. The versatile Fur material lets you create everything from grass to supple animal Fur. Procedural shading is supported along with non-photorealistic effects like cel shading, half-tone shading and contour rendering. Blob volume items give you the ability to create a range of gooey, and viscuous shapes.

CAD Visualization

Special rendering support is provided for visualization of mechanical and architectural designs. Render Booleans let you reveal interior model detail for product cut-away shots. Or you can truncate the view through a camera up to a specified clipping distance, providing an interior cross section that can be animated to gradually reveal or hide objects. You can also smooth sharp edges in mechanical visualizations at render time to emphasize edge highlights or simulate worn looks. Motion blur and depth of field support enhances the presentation of product presentations for truly photorealistic results.

Camera Model

Realistic camera models with industry standard camera backs, adjustable field of view, lens distortion and focal length are provided. Stereoscopic rendering is fully supported with on screen controls that let you get the perfect parallax for every shot. A spherical projection type for camera items allows the creation of spherical environment maps, including export of MODO-created panoramic HDRI’s.

Time-Enabled

The MODO renderer is specifically engineered to exhibit temporal fidelity across multiple frames. The renderer was designed from the ground up to support animation, and so shadows, caustics and even blurry reflections remain stable from frame to frame. A global illumination walkthrough mode provides a clean, yet faster-per-frame approach for architectural animations. Both camera and object motion blurring are supported. Via the MDD format, the MODO renderer can render animated sequences that you can import from other 3D applications.

Shader Tree

Driving the MODO renderer is the Shader Tree, which is MODO’s user interface for describing the appearance of items and the environment, and lets you direct how lights and cameras should participate in the production. The Shader Tree is based on a straightforward stack of layers that combine to produce the final results and is immediately familiar to anyone using Photoshop.

Network Rendering

MODO includes UNLIMITED network rendering on OSX, Windows and Linux; it is multi-threaded to use all available cores on each of your systems. The included MODO_CL (MODO command line) allows MODO to be integrated with any commercial network rendering controller.

See more modeling, UV editing, and sculpting video tutorials at Luxology.tv.

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