Modo 401

Product information
Name: modo 401 Purpose: Model. Paint. Render. Animate. Last updated: 19 March 2010 Current version: 401 SP4 35071 Status: Beta OS: Mac OS X, Windows 32-bit/64-bit Forum Report bugs Feature list Product info Maintainer: Luxology Contact for technical issues: [email protected] ...
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modo 401 is a Digital Content Creation tool from Luxology. It has COLLADA support through the modo COLLADA plug-in.

Compatibility

The modo COLLADA plug-in requires modo 401 SP4 (build 34686) or later, running on either Mac OS X (Intel or PowerPC) or Windows (32-bit or 64-bit).

Exporter

The modo COLLADA exporter can output geometry with normals and multiple UV texture coordinate sets, lights, cameras, materials, effects, and transform animations, all using a “common” technique that is compatible with a wide variety of third-party tools.

The exporter can also output a modo401 profile technique, that provides a human-readable form of many of modo’s items and their internal channels and animation envelopes. Users familiar with the COLLADA file format can also directly edit the exported files using a plain text or XML editing tool.

For additional compatibility with third-party tools, the exporter can also output profiles for a number of third-party DCC tools, such as Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max, that describe a number of elements that are not part of the standard COLLADA specification.

modo COLLADA 401 SP1 build 35071 released

19 March 2010

Package Name: modo COLLADA 401 SP4 build 35071

Release: Build 35071

Release notes: modoCOLLADA_35071.pdf

Highlights of Build 35071

19 March 2010

• Improved transparency handling by adding support for the A_ONE and RGB_ZERO opaque modes for the transparent color element, and its interaction with the transparency element.
• Fixed a bug which was preventing linkage of UV texcoord sets when the optional set attribute was missing. (Fixes linkage of the texcoord set for the “barrycuda” model from Spore.)
• Fixed an inconsistency in how the default UV map name was set when a friendly name wasn’t available for polylist or triangle mesh geometries. In one case, it defaulted to the conventional “TEXn” naming scheme, and in the other case, it fell back to the texcoord source ID. Both geometry types now consistently use the texcoord source ID. (This was the second related bug that was preventing the “barrycuda” model from Spore from loading with its texcoord set already linked.)
• Fixed a runtime error caused by an un-initialized result code for certain cases in the COLLADASceneLoader::LoadColors function.
• Fixed SourceForge bug #2971652, “Model from 3D warehouse fails to load”. The loader was failing to find geometry normals, due to a bug in the VertexMapInputHub::GetNormalInputSourceID function that was introduced in build 34967.
• Fixed SourceForge Bug #2940543, “Crash with area lights”.
• Fixed a bug that was causing the offset attributes for geometry mesh inputs that followed a texcoord set (such as colors or weights) to incorrectly index into their index lists.

Known Issues

Sorted roughly by priority (as of build 35071):

• SourceForge bug #2974894, "Images not found during scene load" (Mac OS X).
  • Fixed in build 35095. The test for an absolute path was incorrect on Mac OS X, such that images that weren't in the same directory as the scene file opened the search for image file dialog.
• SourceForge Bug #2889044, "disabled meshes are not excluded from export"
  • Fix in process (builds 35099 and 35110).
• SourceForge Bug #2977195, "Point-only geometry ignored".
• SourceForge Bug #2977343, "Triangles can't export as triangles".
• SourceForge Bug #2978878, "Spline geometry is ignored".
• SourceForge Bug #2927090, "File loads with no polygons" (loads initial T-pose mesh, but still needs vertex deformers)
• SourceForge Bug #2909572, "Animation for some items not exported"
• SourceForge Bug #2889158, "baked textures not UV mapped properly"
• SourceForge Bug #2888147, "textures not exported properly"
• Need option for saving vertex color maps in RGB or RGBA.
• Need option for merging vertex weights into the alpha channel of an RGBA vertex color map.
• Morph sets.
• Render Camera target for Shade Tree Render item.
• Polygons elements with holes (SketchUp).
  • Single inner loops in process for future build (33018, 33092, 33100).
• Polygons and polylist elements with initial vertices at concave locations.
  • Fix in process for future build (33092).
• Hole conversion in polygons elements with variable maximum index offsets (SketchUp).
  • Fix in process for future build (33141).
• Transform sequences for ambient light (create a locator).
• PolyRender channel I/O.
• Mixed, partial UV sets.
• Import up-axis.
• Import units.
• Add user value to export cfg for modo COLLADA build number in asset tag.
• Polygon "face" or "subdiv" types: polylist/triangle extra param to note all polys of same type.
• Item tags.
• Triangulate scene saver option.
• Add "item_name" to modo profile, for unfiltered name I/O.
• Profile defs should sit in separate .h and .cpp files for each profile.
• Use package API for light target channels (cameras already enabled for modo 401 SP2).
• User channel saving and loading. (Needs more user channel APIs?)
• Group list saving and loading. (Needs packages API?)
• modo profile sub-type for locator vs group locator.
• Fix distant relative image file path I/O.
• Observe double-sided option in Google Earth/Sketchup profile.
• If all transform axis keyframes have values at common times across all axes, then output scale, rotate, and translate animation channel elements as triplets instead of per-axis values.
• Handle combined-triplet channel transforms on import as well.
• Matrix animation subscript indexing (see sample 3ds Max files)
• Profile params for rotate pivot and pivot compensation transform types.
• Resolve relative inter-file URLs in instance nodes during a scene load.
• Polygon part tags.
• Arbitrary polygon tags.
• Fix remaining usages of "io" class variable.
• Full shader tree I/O for materials.
• Need full envelope I/O for render, materials, cameras, lights, and meshes.
• Keyframe behavior mode.
• Loading and saving skin controllers. (Test with Spore models.)
• Support for ZAE zip compression sub-format.
• Performance optimizations.
• Physics library.

Previous Build 34967

12 March 2010

Changes in Build 34967

• Loading and saving of vertex color maps and vertex weight maps, for all supported mesh geometries (polygon, polylist, triangle, and line).
• Load and saving of asset metadata (author, copyright, keywords, revision, subject, and title), with per-scene overrides, which also persist in the native modo file format. (These settings now appear in the Properties panel when the scene item is selected in the Items list, as shown in the section, “Asset Descriptors”.)
• Initial support for loading meshes via skin controllers in their initial T-pose. (TODO: Still needs vertex map deformer support.)
• Fix for material transparency reversal during save and load.
• Fix for loading and saving of custom vertex normal maps (previous vertex maps were saved with the default, automatically calculated geometric normals).
• Fixed bug #20842, “Collada export incremental texture renaming”, by adding a map to associate material targets with their material names (when the user-friendly name is available). With this change, the material ID is only used when the name is not available.

Previous Build 33836

11 December 2009

Changes in Build 33836

• Node elements with multiple instance_geometry elements (SketchUp).
• Mixed geometry mesh types per node during scene load (SketchUp).
• Save and load pivot transforms and their inverses.
• Scene load of transform for straw in styrofoam cup sample.
• Fixes for transform sequence read/write order.
• Recognition of post- vs standard-rotate transforms.

Previous build 32945

21 September 2009

Changes in Build 32945

• Mac OS X version built on Leopard (10.5) to fix missing symbol.
• Item mask observed when writing out common material properties.
• Fixed crash when saving modo profile param animation.
• Effects that have transparent color load with transparent amount.
• Handle third-party extra technique profiles attached to lights.
• Handle texcoord array in STP form (from 3ds Max).
• Work around issue with progress bar during import.
• Support for constant effects (for the XSI Bike headlight).
• Fixes for texcoord index lookup for multiple UV map sets per polygons, polylist, or triangles.
• Applied NCName filtering for geometry names.
• Skip writing image libraries when all texture locators are unlinked.
• Support for polygons elements (as seen in “formica rufa” model).

Previous Build 32654

31 August 2009

Changes in Build 32654

• Valid scene file saved for scenes that only have ambient light.
• Search more than one technique profile within a single extra element.

Previous Build 32619

28 August 2009

Changes in Build 32619

• Recognize multiple instance nodes pointing at same node, and convert to modo instance.
• Export geometry instances during scene save.
• Filter out scale transforms for cameras during scene load.
• Allow animation envelopes with missing interpolation inputs.
• Better handling for isolated or post-rotate transform sequences.
• Load polylines defined by the <lines> element.
• Defer to global asset up-axis when visual scene does not have asset of its own.
• Basic light sub-type I/O (area, dome, cylinder, photometric, etc.)
• Primary light material color I/O.
• Relink texture locator UV maps after scene load with component-based (instanced) mesh items.
• Preflight checks to prevent invalid libraries generated for scenes with empty meshes or no meshes at all.

Previous Build 32472

21 August 2009

Changes in Build 32472

• Dramatic speed-up of scene saving (over 20x for some scenes).
• Support for saving and loading cameras with targets (to be enabled once modo 401 SP2 is released).
• Additional light channel save and load support in the modo401 profile.
• Moved scene up axis into <visual_scene> / <asset>, instead of using a custom modo401 profile param.
• Added a progress bar during scene load.
• Fixed a crash caused by initial rotation transforms that affect fewer than three axes.
• Fixed various compile-time issues for GCC 4 (Snow Leopard).
• Additional error handling.

See also

• Luxology modo 401 extensions

External Links

• modo 401 Product Information
• modo COLLADA on SourceForge