Performance
Nobody wants to work with a brush that stutters or lags behind as you paint. In modo, painting is multi-threaded for maximum performance— even when using large brush sizes modo delivers optimum performance on modern computing hardware. That's how we are able to provide procedural brushes that work fluidly, along with the option to blend (e.g. color dodge) in over a dozen ways while painting. As you paint in modo, you can be painting across multiple images on multiple UV maps.
Ready Access to Tools
A specialized layout in modo for 3D painting gives you quick access to the tools you need for a rich 3D painting experience. All painting is done with a combination of a tool (e.g. smudge) plus a brush (e.g. smooth brush), and the desired ink (e.g. parametric). A panel below the canvas provides you with an image browser (you can actually paint with images), a color picker and a brush preview. The brush preview even shows you how your stroke will fall off at the end of the stroke. You can paint with any pointing device, a pressure sensitive tablet being the preferred one. Painting with symmetry is supported. Want to change brush size? Just right click and drag out the size of your brush, and then keep painting.
Brushes and Inks
A wide variety of tools are provided including airbrush, paintbrush, eraser, clone, line, fill, smudge, blur and lasso. Each tool has properties that include not just color but also opacity and blending modes. Several brush types are provided (stamp, roller, text, procedural) or you can supply your own and select the one you want from the brush browser. Finally, there are the inks... that let you do anything from paint an image onto your model (image ink) to use a parametric ink that modulates the color of your ink depending on the height of the displacement your painting over, or control things like pressure and incidence angle of your pen. modo leverages the fact that you are in a 3D system and will even apply paint according to things like the slope or altitude of the surface you are painting on. The latter makes painting fresh snow on a mountain range or adding pitted surfaces on the leading edges of a wing an easy task. You can also take advantage of real-time mask painting for brush-based control over how two different images (pristine and battle-damaged for example) blend together.
Paint by Layer
Driving the modo renderer is the Shader Tree, which is modo's user interface for describing the appearance of items and the environment, and how lights and cameras should interact with them. Any images you select in the Shader Tree can be painted on immediately in modo.
With this direct access to modo's Shader Tree, you can leverage 3D painting to adjust complex surface appearances layer by layer. This isn't just about brushing on new colors—you can paint bump maps in real-time or paint into channels to affect the specular highlights. modo's Shader Tree also allows you the freedom of painting non-destructively by utilizing the familiar functionality of layer and mask based painting found in popular 2D painting tools. In fact, you can import .PSD files into modo and paint separately on each of the layers found in the file; you can also export UV maps to Photoshop for painting there if you prefer.
Examples:
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