LUXOLOGY, FOUNDED in 2001, is a company located in the famous technology hub at Silicon Valley, and is responsible for developing 3D content creation tool modo for game artists. The firm recently released one of its biggest updates yet to the software, modo 601, which adds numerous new features such as built-in dynamics, volumetric rendering and enhanced reptology modelling tools, helping further create a full pipeline solution for artists. Luxology’s community director
David Tracy says that the latest version of the tool has been a long time in the making, with the foundations already laid out in 501. “Well I can say when we came up with modo 501, a lot of it was in preparation for this release,” says Tracy. “There were a ton of new features with 501, literally hundreds, but they were very small things, like speed improvements and speeding up the rendering engine capabilities, everything like that.”
He adds that with 601, more than a
hundred new features were included, with each one being a new addition,
Blitz “One thing that we always look at is
feedback from people in the trenches, and we always say that modo is for artists,” he says. “There’s so many tasks that you’re doing day-to-day and you’re always under a time crunch, and this is the stuff that isn’t creative, it’s not fun, you can’t write this in one script that just does it magically. “This actually gives people more time in their days to do more of the creative process, rather than having to think about having to draw polygons all day long. That is uninspiring in and of itself.”
such as a full defomartion system and further expanding on its capabilities with topology, turning it into a fully fledged tool rather than taking tentative steps into the area. Perhaps one of the biggest additions,
however, is the inclusion of character animation tools that offer the ability to create fully articulated character rigs that can be manipulated through a full- body inverse kinematics solver and a system of layered deformers.
integration of Ikinema’s Runtime tech to refinforce the software’s new character animation setup by bringing rigging and interactive posing capabilities to the new tool. Tracy says that he hopes that the
latest release further helps game artists do their jobs, and not get bogged down by the non-creative aspects of their roles so that they can focus on creating content.
Codeplay
T: (650) 336-1380 E: Via website contact form W: www.luxology.com