While Modo is used by facilities and design houses, it tends to be only as a modelling tool, with a lot of the other functionality being handled by the more ‘capable’ and embedded content-creation applications. It is telling that the Modo community forum, which was once an energetic and vibrant place full of interesting production-level artwork, is starting to feel bereft and is now only really updated by hobbyists. But, the competition have been paying attention, and why would a new artist pay the hefty asking price for a new seat of Modo when the modelling tools in Maya, Cinema 4D, 3ds Max, Houdini, ZBrush and Blender have notably improved? Arguably by ‘borrowing’ many of Modo’s modelling innovations, each of those applications now offer wider, more established toolsets and ecosystems.

Once an artist gets used to Modo, it is one of the quickest modelling tools around, with an unparallelled selection toolset that is still a joy to use. While Modo 12 works great on OS X, there are still some issues with AMD cards on Windows in terms of viewport performance and stability, which have been around for a couple of releases now.

The Modo 12 UI has been revised to allow quicker access to core palettesĪs mentioned earlier Modo 12 will be a welcome update for many artists who use Modo’s core modelling toolsets, but for potential new users or for those users who have been using Modo 12 as a full content-creation application, the updates to Modo 12 could be seen as at best a point update, not one that deserves a full new release.

Modo software