MODO indie Reviews

Concerning crashes - I might be wrong, but I heard that there are some serious problems with MODO running on Windows 10, and also there is a fix for this coming in a few weeks. I have been using the other version - the plain MODO indie on Windows 8, and it NEVER crashes - I don't even know what a MODO crash looks like. So hold your horses and don't panic - the choppa is on the way. This is the most amazing modeling software I have ever seen - even for a newbie / anti-talent like me - normally, I can barely draw a circle (I'm a games programmer). After a few hours, seeing some very good tutorials available on the official and third party sites, I am confident I can do anything - from models and mechanical structures to environments. My first day in MODO - my first 2 hours actually - following a tutorial I messed something up, and I had to redo everything all over again, and I was able to retrace my steps in a few minutes !!! It goes so fast that it never crosses your mind to give up, because everything you do is a huge waste of time, and the results are riddled with errors and asymmetries anyway – useless for any decent commercial project. How many times did you get that feeling, trying to use a new software, and seeing the modest results of your best efforts? How many times have you seen presentations about how great and easy to use a program is, only to hit a brick wall after you got it, and realize that you will have to pour weeks and months of hard work into it before you get some half decent result that, as a first attempt, will have to be remade anyway from scratch, while you are wondering if you have what it takes - a perfect memory, some rare talent that only some goblins have, and an impossibly steady hand that allows you to move and place everything with the accuracy of an industrial robot? Well, MODO is nothing like that - the interface is simple, intuitive, everything is automated, processed directly with numeric values, and with a few simple commands you can create things that are incredibly detailed. So far I have been building the inner workings of a car – steering, transmission, suspension, things that are rather industrial-design oriented – isn't details and devices that appear to work what everybody wants? Now that I think of it, some degree of realism must exist - many components really need to work since game engines are physics simulations, and if you just attach 4 wheels to a tin barrel, instead of a car you will end up with a shopping cart moving really fast – good luck trying to stay on the road and steer it properly. MODO proved to be everything I hoped it would be. The Foundry has all the best movies you have seen in recent years in their portfolio, and if their software is not enough for you to succeed, then nothing is. We are lucky that they gave us, the little guys, the slightest chance to even touch their software. So non, je ne regrette rien, and neither should you.

Awesome piece of software with tremendous amount of functionality for its price, but export is limited to 100k polygons. I have to export high-poly models piece by piece to Blender for assembly. Then another export from Blender to Substance Painter/Designer for baking. Unnecessary, counterproductive limitation.

UPDATE: It's been almost 6 months since macOS Monterey was released and Foundry still hasn't released a fix for Modo crashing on launch. They don't deserve customers. ----------- Repeating many other reviews, I really like Modo's poly modelling and UI but the other parts of it are hardly passable for professional software. Sculpting even on low poly meshes, especially for corrective morphs, can get extremely slow. Same with texture painting. Animation tools appear fine at first but there are lots of bugs/quirks and you could end up with a somehow broken, unexportable rig but only notice it after you've done a lot of work on it. Exporting FBX files from Modo and importing into Unity almost always results in strange artifacts. Some workflows don't function on some days, but seem fine on other days. etc. etc... By the way these are not Indie-only issues. Pretty much all 3D software seems to have poor UX and lots of bugs, but having to do things *just* perfectly right and putting your work and time at risk like this just isn't good enough in 2021, especially for paid software. It just makes no sense to pay for a product that its company barely acknowledges. If you're going to learn to work around the bugs and quirks of a 3D package, you might as well go for Blender. As much as I like Modo, I regret having sunk so much time into learning it, which I will now have to do again with another package.

Great tool, crashing is way less, modeling tools , Mesh Fushion is amazing... My only complaint, is I wish they would give us atleats limited scripting support if this is for games..Then we need some...My advice is give us to access to like 2-3 scripts at a time, and cant make custom ones, we have to use popular ones made already or something... Give us a bone... Some of us plan to buy the full version, but we need to make money from our games first...I use this daily, but I find my self, moving to Maya or Blender alot to do simple tasks..Its killing me.... For the love of God, that won't kill you to do what I suggested.. Stop already, more people would buy Modo, Indie, and when they make money some will buy full, win, win for you.....

Im getting the ocasional crash, but nothing to intense, mostly when im running photoshop, chrome, excel (for some reason) and maybe some other program at the same time... im a mac user btw. I find modo to be a great program to model, rig and animate... after purchasing it i tried a few tutorials from the foundry but they werent that good, so i keep searching and found the ones from digital tutors (really great tutorials, and no this is not a comercial)... i got the hang of modo pretty quickly, its really user friendly.. As a former blender user, i find some features a little slower in here, but many other things are more comfortable and easy to undestand...

As PC users, we're very used to seeing the word "unplayable" thrown around in Steam reviews. More often than not, this is a far cry from the truth, with users simply being picky and spoiled. This is not the case with MODO Indie 10. Oh my god, the bugs. From "You have no undos left", despite my prefs being set to 100 undos, and not having used a single one of them, to broken symmetry, double polys, and the like. It is broken on PC. It is broken on OSX. More time is spent correcting the program than actually modelling in it. It crashes, it hangs, it freezes. It UNINSTALLS ITSELF. "Save early, save often" is not enough here. You're left having to choose to save after every move, knowing full well that if you save, there is a very real chance that it may just crash and corrupt the file during the process. "Contact support!" I hear you say! As other users have pointed out, MODO does not see Steam users as actual customers. You'll get a generic email back telling you to check the forums. If you find anything in the forums related to your problem, more often than not, it's just other users saying "Same problem here, please fix." As a student at KCAD, our entire class is required to use this program, as the local Underbite Games insists that it is the industry standard. Again, this is absolutely not the case. If you're a student, get Maya for free. If you're anybody else, get Blender for free. There are so many superior options to this broken, rudimentary program. UPDATE: After saving after every major move, the program glitched out, undo stopped working, so I tried reloading to my last major change. I loaded it to find out that the program had not, in fact, actually saved since my initial project save. Hours of work, lost. The save dialog would open, and the overwrite dialog would pop up, but it has not saved since I had barely started on the project.

If you are just getting started in 3d design / development, this is a great tool to learn on. However, you will soon realize that there are strict limitations on what you can accomplish with modo indie. My main pain point is the 100K polycount limit. You can save your high poly model in .lxf format, however, you cannot export into obj/fbx unless you are under the 100k limit. In most cases, you can isolate sections and work on smaller chunks, but this becomes a major hassle when trying to work in a greybox environment. The sad thing is, I can do most of my professional work within this limitation, but it's my personal work that suffers as I want to expand on my abilities, hitting this brick wall every single time. Aside from this limitation, I would highly recommend this software. but I have to vote nay until this limitation is removed as I feel I've hit too many dead ends, which feels like wasted time and energy. Modo devs : Please remove the polycount limit.

I needed something to replace 3DS Max since I only had the student edition (which cannot be used commercially), I cannot afford a subscription, and it was unstable and prone to crashing my computer, so I looked for alternatives; which is where MODO came in. Modeling in MODO Indie is very easy, once you know how to work your way around in the program. You also have the ability to texture, UV unwrap (which I found quite easy to do compared to other programs I've used, by the way), render, animate, and even paint on the mesh directly. You also have the option of remapping the keys in order to make using the program a customizable experience, and even has a number of preset options which mimic other programs; an option for 3DS Max was a godsend for me, but there's also options for MAYA, Cinema 4D, and more, which makes learning the program quite a bit less intimidating. There are a few shortcomings and limitations for MODO Indie, however. The biggest ones are that it uses its own file type (called .lxf) for saved meshes, so it's impossible to open meshes made with MODO Indie in other programs without exporting it to another file type. This is where its second biggest limitation lies: meshes with more than 100,000 polygons cannot be exported at all. It may sound like a large number, but trust me, it really isn't. This is fine if you're working on a video game by yourself (since real-time applications only use low-poly meshes anyway), but these two limitations make it very difficult to share work between team members. Additionally, scripting is not supported in MODO Indie, although I've yet to encounter a situation where this proves to be a major setback. Thankfully, those are the only major limitations, so go nuts with the animating, texture mapping and UV-ing! There is one issue I encountered with the paint tool, though, and it's that the texture I'd painted on became darker and darker each time I reloaded it. This is easily solvable by simply using a separate program for painting on textures, though, and MODO is primarily a tool for modeling, anyway. Those limitations aside, MODO Indie is a very powerful modeling program, and is very reasonably priced for what it is.

I've used many products over the years, 3ds Max, Maya, Blender, and now Modo Indie 901. I think modeling overall is pretty fast and is what most people talk about when you think of modo. However, the problems arise when you start to get into creating a skeleton and binding it to the mesh. I have never worked with software that is so painful to use in this area. Whole features that don't work such as mirroring a set of bones over. or in the case that you did get symmetry to work it only works during creation. When you have to change the bones later symmetry no longer works. Bascially Bone creation becomes a very 'Eye-balled' process where you can't even guarantee that the bones are symmetrical. When you start weighting all this, Half the menu's that are in the documentation dont even match what you are seeing. You are left trying to figure out why you can't see a menu, or get access to something that is supposed to be there. It becomes a very 'Eye-balled' process once again. For a payed program there seems to be less documentation than that of Blender. I can't realistically see using this to create any game for production. Too many core features that were 'Put' into the app as 'Working' and effectively don't work at all. If your on a tight budget, just start learning Blender since its free. If money is not an issue, 3ds Max would be my recommendation. If you're somewhere in between Maya LT is a very good option for indies. I believe all those options are far better than Modo indie 901. I've already sunk money into the original Modo indie and the expansion 901. At this point I'm giving up on this software

Don't buy it, subscibe or whatever. Because you will find yourself in an ackward position. Basically, Foundry doesn't see Steam customers as Their customers at all. I'v posted a question via customer service on their site and waited for a day just to get this: Quote: ... Please note that this Email Address ([email protected]) is for Commercial Customers Only. Support for Modo Indie is provided via the Steam Forum which can be found ... Thats it, its basically a FY message.