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modo RendererFast and threaded for up to 32 cores. Instance and replicator rendering to trillion polygon detail. modo comes fully equipped with one of the world's great renderers for creating gorgeous images and animations — and for baking out textures for game engines. The renderer is provided as both an offline renderer and as an integrated Preview Renderer that updates nearly instantly as you model, paint or change any item property within modo. The modo renderer is an over-achiever that offers that rare blend of speed and quality, and is licensed for network rendering on up to 50 workstations.
Seriously FastThe 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 up to 32 cores per workstation. Under the hood, the modo renderer is a fast ray-tracer with instancing support that uses high dynamic range radiance units throughout. It is highly scaleable 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 huge flexibility in balancing memory use, speed, and quality. We recently finished a job for Hellman»s which consisted of over 8000 cg glass bottles. modo allowed us to render these all in one scene with Gi at 7500k 300dpi. Nothing else we tried would do it! —Clive Biley, London
Preview RendererThe modo Preview Renderer is a constantly rendered view of your scene through any selected camera where you see the effect of every modeling, lighting or material change you make in the scene. If nothing is happening in the scene, the Preview Renderer will progressively render to near final quality. This is a game-changing way to work, for you are essentially doing hundreds or thousands of test renderings as you are working. By the time you do a final render, you know exactly what it is going to look like. And you also quickly become familiar with how every parameter in modo affects your final rendering because you can see each individual change as it is made. The Preview Renderer really brings rendering back upstream into the creative process where it belongs. —Yazan Malkosh
Accurate Lighting ModelsGlobal 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 with Deep Shadows is supported. Light linking allows you get the right amount of light in every part of your scene and lighting rigs of many kinds are included in the many Presets that come with modo. I had an interesting challenge I solved using modo yesterday. I was doing a time-lapse photography session outdoors and one of my props blew over halfway through the day. I modeled the prop in modo and then rendered it at various daylight settings. After massaging it into the scene in PS, I have a 10 second time-lapse video that’s flawless and absolutely no one can tell there’s a rendered model in the photographs! —Gary Bouton, Professional Photographer, Graphic Artist and Author, GaryBouton.com
Surface RealismThe modo renderer is capable of trillion polygon renderings with astonishing detail. Micropoly tessellation at render time delivers effects like skin, slightly rough surfaces or even terrain with greatly heightened believability. Instance Replicators deliver additional depth and detail by letting you add almost limitless numbers of any geometry 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 tropical lagoons, skin or wax.
Furmodo supports a variety of sophisticated materials (including procedurals) and Fur. This versatile material allows a wide variety of things from hair, tinsel, grass, and even fur to be applied to surfaces. The fur can be driven by textures, and has many parameters including root bend, transparency and gravity. You can apply Fur using Fur Presets and then style Fur interactively, using the Sculpting tools.
Camera ModelRealistic camera models with industry standard camera backs, adjustable field of view, lens distortion and focal length are provided. Stereoscopic rendering is supported. A spherical projection type for camera items allows the creation of spherical environment maps, including export of modo-created panoramic HDRI’s.
Time-EnabledThe modo renderer is specifically engineered to exhibit temporal fidelity across multiple frames. The renderer is designed to support animation, and so shadows 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 out animated sequences from a number of other 3D applications.
Network Renderingmodo can be used on up to 50 Mac or PC workstations for network rendering. Each workstation can have up to 32 cores. Setup is extremely easy and is largely automatic; Systems set up in “slave” mode will accept buckets (tiles) to be rendered from a “master’ machine. The image to the left shows network rendering in progress in modo. On the screen are buckets being rendered locally (gold color) and on the network (in blue). Each bucket corresponds to a single “core” on a local or network machine. The underlying network technology is Apple Bonjour. modo network render slaves are effortless to setup. modo finds and starts using the slaves automatically, without hassle. —Michael Blackbourn VFX artist, The Embassy Visual Effects Inc.
Shader TreeDriving the modo renderer is the Shader Tree, which is modo’s user interface for describing the appearance of items and the environment, and a place to specify 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. The Shader Tree also provides full control over what final render passes should be produced (e.g. specular, alpha, many more).
Flexible OutputsThe modo renderer can produce a wide variety of individual render outputs, or it can 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. A wide range of output image formats are supported including layered PSD files, layered OpenEXR or a series of PNG files for example.
Rendering ExamplesHundreds more in the Gallery. See more modeling, UV editing, and sculpting video tutorials at Luxology.tv.
 MicroFilmmaker Magazinemodo 401 Review by Mark Bremmer – September 2009 “The interface is easy on the eyes, chock full of contextual menus, and displays some really common-sense features that leave me crying for similar features in the other packages I work with.” “If you have multiple computers in your studio and want to create a render farm to accelerate your renders, I’ve found no easier set up than modo.” “The rendered output from 401 is just fantastic.”
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