March 15, 2007

Luxology Unveils modo 203 with UV Editing Enhancements, Faster Rendering, and DXF Plug-in

San Mateo, Calif. - Luxology LLC, maker of 3D content creation software, has announced the immediate availability of modo 203.
With enhanced UV editing tools, faster rendering speed, and a new DXF translator plug-in, modo 203 offers performance and workflow improvements to its modo customers creating high-quality 3D content for game development, design visualization, film visual effects, video production, and graphic arts.
Registered modo 202 customers receive the modo 203 update free of charge. A free 30-day full-featured evaluation version is available for immediate download from www.modo3d.com.

"The technology we are introducing for UV editing really elevates modo to best in class in this critically important phase of 3D workflow," says Brad Peebler, president of Luxology. "We also added a DXF translator for customers in the design and architectural visualization fields and made our wicked-fast renderer even faster."

The UV unwrap tool has been improved so that UVs are laid out by the software with less angular and proportional distortion, as compared to the geometric polygon volume. To help modo users interactively relax the UV data, the UV pinning function has been improved. The seal hole option in UV unwrap has also been overhauled for more reliability on enclosed spaces in the mesh, such as eye sockets. UV editing is also improved through the addition of a move and sew option -- an enhancement to the previous sew capability that makes the joining and scaling of discontinuous UVs a one-step operation. Copying and pasting a UV between polygons is now facilitated in modo, and a new UV orient capability makes it very easy to have all UVs perfectly lined up horizontally or vertically.

The modo renderer has received two additional speed injections in modo 203. The fundamental operation of ray tracing has been boosted as much as 1.4 times in tests conducted by Luxology and even greater speed has been reported by beta testers. In addition to faster production rendering, ambient occlusion and full light "baking" operations also benefit from the ray-tracing speed improvement. Irradiance caching has been optimized, further improving global illumination performance on large resolution renderings.

Modo 203 also features a new DXF plug-in that reads and writes ASCII DXF files. Architects and designers can now use modo to import a range of 2D and 3D content from DXF files; including polymesh, arcs, circles, lines, points, polylines, and more. Layers in the incoming DXF files are automatically created as corresponding layers in the modo scene to preserve file organization. On export from modo, the new translator converts modo triangles and quads into a polymesh, with vertex connectivity maintained.  

Modo, offered on a single disc supporting Mac OS X and Windows, sells for a suggested retail price of $895. Current modo 202 users receive the modo 203 update as an electronic download free of charge. A free 30-day full-function evaluation version of modo 203 is also available for immediate download from modo3d.com.