MODELLING

Have you ever replicated an item only to find that its textures didn't copy across?

Ever needed a low-poly bird for a background, or wanted to sculpt an organic shape like an animal or human but didn't want to start totally from scratch? Did you know modo has them built-in? They're part of the Solid Sketch menu.

The Solid Sketch tool provides a quick method for “roughing” out organic shapes. By clicking down, new nodes are created and Solid Sketch connects these dots with a smooth flowing mesh. Each node can spawn new branches to create complex shapes quickly and easily.

When you click to create a node you can immediately drag to the right and left to scale the node. Once you have released the mouse button you can use the various handles to move, scale, rotate and twist the node. Additionally, holding the Shift key and dragging on the center handle will scale on all three axes. Clicking on a node with the middle-mouse button will delete that node.

Note: It seems for some reason that this functionality has been removed from MODO701.  

Go to > Geometry > Curve Palette > Presets

When rendering out characters, most times it's preferable to have them looking straight at the camera. But you may need to move the camera around quite a bit so that you can get just the right angle, which means, you will need to keep manually adjusting the eyes so that they continue to look towards the camera. There is a way though that you can constrain the eyes to remain fixed on a particular spot (locator). That way you can then move the locator anywhere around and the eyes will follow, making it a lot easier for you to set up your shot.

If however, you move the locator really close to the eyes, they will go cross-eyed, so using a central controller can help deform the eyes in a non-destructive manner.

Have you ever been modelling and you accidentally hit the tab or shift-tab key changing your model from regular faces, to Sub-D, or Pixar-SubS without realising it?

If half your model was in P-Sub and the other half, in Sub-D, could you tell which was which?

Well there is a way, even if it is very subtle.

Just run your mouse over the affected polys and you'll see that when you pre-select the different types of subdivision surfaces that, sub-d is shaded purple, regular faceted polygons (faces) are shaded blue, and P-Subs are shaded green.

I wish they were a little more pronounced though.

• Sub-Ds - Subdivision Surface smoothed polygons.
• Faces - regular standard unsmoothed polygon faces.
• P-Subs - Pixar Catmull-Clark smoothed polygons.

Edit: As I mentioned earlier, the colors are quite subtle. But when I went to change them from their default settings to much darker colors, via > Preferences > Display > Colors >Selection Rollovers, you can still barely discern any difference.