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Neat tips

Here you'll find a variety of MODO gems & tips I've managed to either figure out myself or collected along the way which hopefully will help improve your workflow. You can never have too many tricks up your sleeve! ;)

1

Lining up texture locators

Most people think that Texture Locators are just those widgets that get in the way while you're trying to work on your scene, but James Darknell takes some time to explain how they work and offers a different way to quickly align them to your item's surface.

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Numeric Entry Field Tips

One of the handiest things you can use in your everyday workflow is the versatile way you can approach entering numbers into MODO. Here in this video, James Darknell explains a variety of ways that even many MODO experts are unaware of.

http://community.thefoundry.co.uk/tv/training/view.aspx?id=659

I particularly like the Gang Edit. 🙂

In addition to being able to edit the number fields by typing in numbers, users can gang edit all three fields simultaneously by LMB+Clicking the icon to the left of the mini-slider enabling the feature.

Gang-edit

 

INDEPENDENT - The default is i 'Independent', controls are edited independently.

COPY - The first click changes the field = 'Copy', will make whatever you type into the first field, the same in the other two fields.

PROPORTIONAL - The second click changes to ∞ (infinity) 'Proportional' where value changes are applied proportionally to all like controls.

RELATIVE - The third click changes to + 'Relative', the value change is added to all like controls. For instance if you divided the first field by /2 the other two fields would recalculate dividing by two as well.

When entering numeric values, you can use keyboard equivalents as well, such as;

'Ctrl'+'Alt'+'Enter'for Copy

'Ctrl'+'Enter' for Proportional

'Alt'+'Enter' for Relative

 

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Aligning silhouette people to the Camera

Description

Architectural visualization is often known for its silhouettes of people going about their day. These 2D stencil images can be downloaded from the 'net, or from the MODO asset share site. When it comes to changing camera angles though, it's not necessary for you to go around and tweak each person so that they remain aligned to the camera. Here's a trick I saw Brad Peebler do a few years back.

Step-by-Step

  • Under the Animate tab at the top..
  • in Item mode, select the silhouette Mesh, then Shift-select the camera
  • click on Direction Constrained in the Modifier section

 
Render-Backwards                

You'll notice then that when you move the camera, the 2D Item Mesh will always align to the camera. However, one thing that you probably won't want it to do is, tilt when you move the camera up or down. You just need it to move on the Y-axis only

Render-Backwards
             
  • On the righthand-side, under the Properties tab..
    • click on the Direction Constraint tab
    • click on Add output Options
    • change the Opacity on both the X and Z axes
 
Forum Link http://community.thefoundry.co.uk/tv/training/view.aspx?id=483
Source  Brad Peebler
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How to 'playblast' an animation

Description

Before you go wasting a heap of time rendering out an entire movie in final quality without even knowing whether it'll work, I suggest that you first render out a lower-res version. In Maya this is called a Playblast.

In modo, I could never remember how to do this. That's why I am posting it here because I am sure a lot of other people either don't know about it, or else, cannot remember where to find it either. But beware, it won't be a nice looking render. It will look just like your viewport, including lights, camera and locators. It's basically so you can check your composition and timing

An alternative lo-res solution, is to render out your animation with a capped time limit. This will look more like a draft version, and can be especially helpful if you know your scene is going to take say 12-24 hours to render properly - and especially if you know things will more than likely need to be changed, but you just don't want to waste all that time waiting at this point, so you could set it up for say 6 hours instead, so that it can be done say over night.

http://www.alphageekgirl.com/?p=1065
Step-by-Step
    • Under the Animation Tab, right-click in the viewport and select 'Record OpenGL to Movie'
Version   MODO 701 / 801
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Resize the camera icon

If you add an object, sometimes that camera just is a little too big for the scene, especially when getting in close. Or by the same token, if you've got a really large object, your camera is almost invisible; it's too tiny. So under the Display, with that camera selected, there is the Size. This is the view size; it's not the actual size of your renderer or anything else--it's the size of the camera icon. 

Resize camera icon to relative

So you can change that depending on your scene, and what I've often told people is just set it to 0 and it stays relative to your zoom. So notice the camera pretty much stays the same size, whether you zoom in or out, and that's really kind of nice. So I always know where it is. If I zoom out really far, my objects are hard to see, but because I have this size set to 0, I can always find my camera. So, something to think about when you are building larger scenes.

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