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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.

9.8/104votes
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Getting rid of weirdness

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.

Intersecting Polys

Intersecting polygons

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.

FBX Normals

FBX Normals

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.

FBX Normals

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

Vertex Map menu

Vertices that fly into outta space

Errant Vertices

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.

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Making facial deformations using weight maps

Video Date March 8, 2006
Area Covered

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.

Author Greg Leuenberg - Sabpro
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Faster Modeling in MODO

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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Kicking up dust

Description Using the new particle system, create the effect of dust being kicked up as a hover biker travels across open terrain.
Origin Supplied by Luxology as part of the Spotlight video series that came with the release of 701 SP1
 modo Version 701 SP1
Description

With the supplied hoverbike, rider and terrain, this series shows how you can create dust particles and get them to kick-up when the hover bike flies by. 

 
URL 701Spotlight_Video_01.mp4 (Download from your Luxology account)
Presenter Andy Brown
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