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View our modo Evaluation Software Frequently Asked Questions page

It appears that InstallShield, on some configurations, cannot deal with the large install size of modo 302. If you experience this error, please click here to contact us and we help you through this install.
(Update posted 4/4/08 12:00 p.m.)

A complete list of changes can be found in the comprehensive modo 302 Improvements document. (PDF file)

modo 302 requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later

Adjust it here: System » Preferences » Display » OpenGL » Selection Rollovers.

On the Mac, the supported version of Python is 2.3.5 (this is the default for MaxOS X 10.4.x.) On the PC, modo links with Python 2.4.2. Any Python modules placed in the Configs or Scripts directories will be available for import.

Please refer to the instructions for downloading modo 302 for the location of the license key download. Once you have downloaded the license key it is a simple matter of running the installer.

OSX users:

1. Open the archive file
2. Drag the license file onto the Apple Script icon located in the same directory.
3. Done!

Windows users:

1. Unarchive the zip file
2. Run the Setup.exe file
3. Done!

(Note to Windows XP users: Windows XP will display the contents of an archive prior to the file being expanded. If you try to run the installer from this view it will fail complaining that it can not find the license key. You MUST uncompress the archive to a folder prior to running the installer.)

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modo‘s built in distributed rendering is based on Bonjour. Bonjour comes with every Mac computer and is bundled with the Windows version of modo. You can use a combination of Windows and Mac machines to render across a network. Once a Bonjour connection is working between your master computer and other workstations that have modo running in “Slave” mode, modo will show the buckets being computed by other computers as different colors in the render window on the Master system.

modo can also be run in a headless or command line fashion, which can be handy for rendering.

The built-in network rendering in modo is best suited to fewer large frames that take a long time to render, and is especially useful when rendering large stills. The biggest gains with modo's built-in network rendering will be for high resolution images that are dominated by bucket rendering time (as opposed to pre-pass time), such as scenes using non-cached indirect illumination, blurry reflections, depth of field, subsurface scattering, complex refraction, etc.

If you have lots of small, fast frames to render the built-in network rendering is not ideally suited for this. These are best rendered with a conventional “one frame per processor” render controller, from a 3rd party such as the ones from GwynneR, Paul Lord and others. These control modo in a more conventional manner, where each instance of modo/modo_cl is operating independently of the others, but in unison with a controller that divvies out specific frames for each individual machine.

Some history should be noted: In modo 301, every modo “slave” had to compute all the irradiance cache pre-passes, which meant that slaves sometimes never had time to contribute any finished buckets if they were slower than the master. In modo 302, the master computes the pre-passes and then sends the cache to the slaves, so slower slaves can get started on the buckets sooner. This is less optimal than the 301 method if the slaves machines are faster than the master, but we found that most people use their fastest machine as the master. More importantly, the new method allows network rendering to take advantage of Walkthrough Mode.