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Animated walk cycles
For anyone who is not a full-time rigger or animator, but has tried to create a simple walk cycle, you'll no doubt remember all the time and effort you put in, only to have your character walk like a zombie. Well, a fellow MODOnaut, Michael Gass, has created this animated walk-cycle script for ACS rigs that will help you out immensely. Even if it's not perfect, it will get you well on your way!
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May 26, 2015
Posted by Debi in All Articles, Layouts, Neat tips, Texture Locators, Textures, Tutorial Video IndexLining 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.
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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| 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 |
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| Version | MODO 701 / 801 | ||
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.
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.
When you first start out using MODO you are bound to come across some aberrations in your models which you know are wrong, but you have no idea what you did to mess it up, and you certainly have no clue how to fix it. While I certainly cannot predict every problem you'll encounter, as a noob, here are a few that have stumped me.
Initially, when I first encountered this I thought it was a texture problem. Whenever I ran my mouse over it, it would flicker and splutter. It drove me nuts for an hour before I figured out that it was in fact actually two polygons intersecting, or rather overlapping each other along the same plane. Once you know, you can usually figure this out visually, and either move the offending polygon away a bit, or delete it altogether if it's not required.
In the second example, I had imported an .fbx file that had previously been exported from Autodesk's CAD application, Revit. I knew that whatever the problem was, it was something that went wrong in the export process. So after checking for overlapping polygons, n-gons and any other aberration I'd come across before, I went straight to an expert and asked my mate, Paulo Madeira (Madeira3D) if he could shed any light.
Immediately, he responded and explained that I would need to select all the offending mesh items, go to Lists > Other Maps, select FBX_Normals, right-click and delete them.
Even though this should have worked, at first it didn't for me. I would select Delete and nothing would happen. So instead, I went to the Vertex Map menu at the top and selected Delete from there, and it worked. Of course (as it always does ;)), the next time I opened MODO and tried right-clicking and deleting the FBX Normal maps, it worked O.o
And lastly, this will occur occasionally without you noticing. You'll be working up-close on something and then when you zoom out, you'll see your mesh is messed up because a vertex decided that it didn't want to play with the others. Don't do what I did the first time - and that is, select the 'cone of polygons' and delete them - otherwise, you'll find you've created a big hole in your mesh. Instead, select the single vertex and backspace or delete it, and it should fix itself.
| Video Date | March 8, 2006 | ||
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In repsonse to a question I received today, here's an old video that I found which explains how to use MODO's tool pipe to paint soft selections. Greg shows how to add a Weight Map to a face, and then paints areas such as the nose and eyebrows so they can be deformed. |
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| Author | Greg Leuenberg - Sabpro | ||
Over the past 2 years, more than ever, there's been a huge increase of experienced users coming over from Maya, 3DS, SoftImage to MODO.
Now, many of the everyday modelling tools are fairly similar and most people pick it up pretty quickly. However, often there are those idiosyncrasies that are unique to MODO which experienced users just don't know about.
So for this post, I'm going to share with you a link to Henning Sanden's article on "Faster Modeling in MODO" (Obsolete http://henningsanden.com/2013/03/31/how-to-optimize-modo-for-faster-modeling/). He wrote it a while back, but much of it is still relevant now. It includes, how to;
Assign hotkeys
Make your own custom pie menus
as well as some of Henning's favourite scripts that I don't already have listed on my own, "My fave MODO scripts" page.
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