Made with Silo

It’s been a busy couple of weeks of news for 3D guys and game modders and I’ve got some of the highlights.

One of the things just about every 3D project requires is modeling; creating the surface and shapes that make up the worlds we see in renders and that we interact with in games.  Without models we wouldn’t have things to apply textures to, objects for dynamics to simulate against and things to bounce light off of.  We feel like there are two really strong polygon modelers on the market right now; Nevercenter’s Silo and Luxology’s Modo.  While most 3D packages have modeling tools built in and you can certainly get great results with them, Silo and Modo offer very streamlined modeling tool sets.

Silo: still alive?  On sale–and Nevercenter is working on a Game Engine

Nevercenter’s Silo is an awesome application that just does modeling, UV mapping and sculpting, and at a relatively low price it’s a fantastic tool for hobbyists and modders.  Nevercenter is one of those companies that do a great job communicating with their users; they posted a development update just days ago on their forum.  Silo users will want to especially take note of this quote:

As we embrace this approach, it means that we no longer devote all our time and energy to the development of Silo–and we feel like Silo has reached a point of maturity where it doesn’t need that. We still have a plan for Silo, and it is still under active development, but you’ll probably see that development happen in shorter bursts at key times.

While I agree that it’s a mature product there still so much it could do, especially refining the sculpting tools and pushing the polycount much farther to actually compete with Zbrush and Mudbox.  On the other hand, one exciting thing to note is that they’re primarily working on a game engine now; I know I’ll be excited to see what they’re doing when they release more details.

While Silo doesn’t sound like it’s under heavy development it is still a really solid product and right now is a great time to buy while they have their summer sale going.  Silo Core is $79 instead of $99 and Professional is $129 instead of $159.  If you just want to model then Silo Core is a fine choice but if you’re interested in doing UV mapping and sculpting displacements you’re going to want to pick up Professional.  You can check it out further and download the trial at Nevercenter’s site.

Modo 401 Released!

When Modo was created it began as a hardcore polygon modeling tool and it has since been expanding slowly into other areas of 3D while continuing to refine the tools already in place. The architecture of Modo is powerful and we’re impressed that they haven’t rushed to make this an entire pipeline tool and instead focus on adding component by component and doing them right in the first version they introduce them in.

Modo has now grown into a powerful app for modeling, texturing, sculpting, lighting, simple animation, and rendering; now 401 introduces fur, an incredible preset library with a social asset sharing site built in and new mechanical rigging tools with a large selection of constraints. Additionally, advanced lighting and rendering techniques like motion blur, depth of field, volumetric lighting, dispersion, anisotropic direction and many other features have been added to what is already one of the fastest and most noise free global illumination renderers on the market.

Another area Modo excels at is handling immense scenes with billions of polygons using its powerful 3D engine and tools like replicators to take far more advantage of your gaming rig then any other 3D program will even try to do.

Okay, so that’s enough technical terms, what does all this mean to game modders or someone interested in getting into 3D? Well, it means that it’s a super powerful program and it covers a lot of the things you’ll be doing in game modding and particularly modeling and texturing. The preset system is going to be very effective at getting things done quickly and it doesn’t look like it’s going to be the same lame preset systems we’ve all avoided in the past–if the built-in and community presets don’t help you out it’s a nice pipeline for sharing components with your team.

Modo is also great if you’re going to be doing any cinematic renderings for your project; it’s beautiful, powerful, easy and fast. However, if you want to do character rigging and animation you’re going to need to invest in another program or wait until Luxology builds better tools for this into a future version of Modo. The exception to this is if you’re working with mechanical characters, the new tools work great for things like cars, tanks, helicopters, or mechs and can definitely be used for some robot characters depending on what you’re going for.

At $995.00 Modo is probably out of the budget for anyone but the most serious game modders or 3D pros but the upgrade prices are good and their licensing and DRM model is one of the best we’ve ever seen from a production app. They let you install Modo anywhere–on both PC and Mac–all you need is the license key file with you and it will automatically let you run Modo wherever you install it as long as it isn’t running somewhere else. We love it when companies like Luxology choose to trust their users instead of imposing frustrating DRM on their software.  Modo also generously gives you 50 render licenses and each one can support up to 32 cores for setting up a render farm.

More info, pretty renders and lots of screencasts can be found at Luxology’s site.

A few other items of interest:

• Wings 3D, a free 3D modeling program with a solid workflow has been updated to 1.1.4.1 for their developer release, we checked it out and we like it, especially on Windows.
• Quad Software has released Grome 2, a nice looking 3D landscape tool that includes 64-bit support and has water and vegetation built in.  We haven’t tried it yet but it looks interesting and you can pick up a copy for just €540.00 (about $750.00 USD).
• If you’re a fan of the open source and fully featured 3D package Blender then you might be interested in the Blender Conference 2009 putting out the call for participation.
• If you’ve found any of this news interesting then you may want to check out the recently launched a 3D digg clone CGDigg, we’re not sure about the Digg model but it looks to be a nice site for your CG news.