A neon cowboy in a storefront window pointed the way to a Siggraph highlight: the public unveiling of Luxology’s long-anticipated Modo software at the Museum of Neon Art downtown.
Three years in the making, the real-time subdivision surface/polygonal modeler is the first application to emerge from the ambitious young company’s new Nexus 3D graphics engine technology. Designed to fit into existing pipelines, the $895 PC and Mac-based product was scheduled to begin shipping in September, with a Linux version slated for next year.
"We’re looking at places in the pipeline where studios and game companies have to jump through hoops to do what they want to do," said President Brad Peebler.
Founded by three former NewTek luminaries — Alan Hastings, known for LightWave’s animation and rendering, Stuart Ferguson, known for LightWave’s modeler, architecture and cross-platform capability, and Peebler, former VP of 3D — Luxology has adopted a "plays well with others" approach: Modo boasts an invisible file format, a mutable interface, and an elastic toolset.
"We don’t save out raw Modo files," said Peebler. "If you load a Maya file, it stays as a Maya file. If you load a LightWave file it stays as a LightWave file. We’ve done a tremendous amount of work to roundtrip the data. We can take a Maya-based model with an entire sequence of blend shapes, import it into Modo, make any arbitrary change, and export it out without damaging the links. The blend shapes are protected." The software tucks away any extra information as if it were plug-in data.
The chameleon interface also helps Modo blend into a studio’s workflow. " Artists can set up a project interface and make it look like Maya," says John Gross, co-president of Hollywood-based Eden FX, a beta-test site. "Also, it’s scalable. If a panel is reduced to one line, it turns into a pop-up, but if it’s large it’s a list."
Similarly, Modo’s toolset is flexible. "Subdivision surfaces are organic by nature, but we also have great deformation tools," says Peebler. "We have eight types of fall-off that can be combined with any of the tools, not just transforms, and we have variable edge creasing."
With edge-creasing, a modeler can select individual points on the faces of a geometric model to manipulate as a unit. "Imagine a sphere made of polygons forming stripes around it," says Gross. "You could select a line of points around it like an equator. That’s an edge. You could then turn the ball into a rounded hour-glass figure by squishing the equator line."
Luxology believes the sum adds up to faster workflow, which could be made faster with their Nexus rendering application due out in 2005. Working on a Macintosh G5 at the Siggraph demo, Hastings flew a camera through a ray-traced scene with hundreds of multicolored 3D hippos and changed colors on the fly. The renderer, which is integrated with Modo, is designed specifically to help modelers working in film and TV and for print graphics and gaming studios, not, Peebler attests, as a competitor to RenderMan or Mental Ray. "Our goal is to augment the pipeline," he says.
The cowboys at this company have learned that blending into the herd is the best way to move it.
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