modo comes fully equipped with one of the world's great renderers for creating gorgeous images and animations—or for baking out textures for game engines or other downstream uses. The modo render engine is fast. It can render millions of polygons at enormous frame sizes. And when it comes to quality, options like Physically-Based Shading and HDRI support lend a degree of realism can let modo renderings pass for actual photographs. The modo renderer is an over-achiever that offers that rare blend of speed and quality, and is licensed for network rendering on up to 50 workstations.

Seriously Fast

Watch modo Render

Rendering on Apple Mac Pro with 8 cores

The modo renderer is a fast ray-tracer with instancing support that uses high dynamic range radiance units throughout. It is highly scaleable on multi-core systems, delivering nearly linear speedups as more processors are added. Its innately fast performance is a combination of very tight code and a unique front-end that decouples several of the key computations (e.g. micropolygon tessellation) thus allowing for huge flexibility by balancing memory use, speed, and quality. The modo renderer can render huge print resolution files (e.g. 20K x 20K) using up to 32 cores per workstation. This efficient use of hardware has made modo a favorite tool of computer makers and analysts who want to accurately benchmark multi-core performance.

	“We recently finished a job for Hellman’s which consisted of over 8000 cg glass bottles. modo allowed us to render these all in one scene with Gi at 7500k 300dpi. Nothing else we tried would do it!” – Clive Biley, London

Accurate Lighting Models

Physical Sky 2

Niko Poulopoulos

Physical Sky 1

Niko Poulopoulos

Global illumination and physically-based shading models are available, providing for advanced optical phenomena such as anisotropic blurry reflections, indirect caustics, and subsurface scattering. Realistic camera models with lens distortion, motion blur, and depth of field are provided. modo now includes Physical Sky and Physical Sun rendering for accurate sunlight at any location as well as support for photometric lighting through the IES standard. Transparency absorption automatically considers subsurface density for realistic portrayal of tropical lagoons, skin or wax. Anisotropic highlights and support for fresnel reflections deliver realistic metallic surfaces and correct reflections and refractions at any angle to the camera.

Micropoly Displacement

Rodrigo Gelmi

Surface Realism

The modo renderer is capable of extremely fast micropoly tessellation of surfaces at render time. This results in many millions of superfine polygons that can easily deliver effects like textured ceilings in a room and heightened believability across almost any object (as relatively few surfaces appear truly smooth to the human eye).

Time-Enabled

Michael Blackbourn, model by Marko Dabrovic

QuickTime 10 MB

The modo renderer is specifically designed to produce steady, noise-free animations. A global illumination walkthrough mode provides a clean, yet faster-per-frame approach for architectural animations. Shadows and even blurry reflections remain stable from frame to frame. Both camera and object motion blurring are supported. Via the MDD format, the modo renderer can render out animated sequences from a number of other 3D applications.

Network Rendering

modo can be used on up to 50 Mac or PC workstations for network rendering. Each workstation can have up to 32 cores. Setup is extremely easy and is largely automatic; Systems set up in “slave” mode will accept buckets (tiles) to be rendered from a “master” machine.

Network Rendering

The image to the left shows network rendering in progress in modo. On the screen are buckets being rendered locally (gold color) and on the network (in blue). Each bucket corresponds to a single “core” on a local or network machine. The underlying network technology is Apple Bonjour.

	"modo network render slaves are effortless to setup. modo finds and starts using the slaves automatically, without hassle." - Michael Blackbourn VFX artist, The Embassy Visual Effects Inc.

Shader Tree

Shader Tree Close-Up

Driving the modo renderer is the Shader Tree, which is modo’s user interface for describing the appearance of items and the environment, and a place to specify how lights and cameras should participate in the production. The Shader Tree is based on a straightforward stack of layers that combine to produce the final results and is immediately familiar to anyone using Photoshop. The Shader Tree also provides full control over what final render passes should be produced (e.g. specular, alpha, many more).

Preview Renderer

Preview Render Multi-Core

QuickTime 28 MB

Final rendered results in modo are rarely a surprise because in addition to the high-quality OpenGL views, you also have a preview renderer that gives you an interactive lit view of your scene as it is updated. As you model or paint, the preview renderer refreshes and gives you handy view of what a final rendering will look like.

	"I had an interesting challenge I solved using modo yesterday. I was doing a time-lapse photography session outdoors and one of my props blew over halfway through the day. I modeled the prop in modo and then rendered it at various daylight settings. After massaging it into the scene in PS, I have a 10 second time-lapse video that's flawless and absolutely no one can tell there's a rendered model in the photographs!" - Gary Bouton, Professional Photographer, Graphic Artist and Author, GaryBouton.com

Flexible Outputs

The modo renderer can produce a wide variety of individual render outputs, or it can be used to bake over thirty results (like geometric normals, diffuse shading, ambient occlusion) into image maps. A Constant Alpha option lets you easily create mask elements for compositing work. A wide range of output image formats are supported including layered PSD files, layered OpenEXR or a series of PNG files for example.

Baking Multiple Maps in a Single Pass QuickTime 22.7 MB

Faster and Cleaner Blurry Reflections QuickTime 7.3 MB

Render Outputs Masking Options QuickTime 21.2 MB

Examples: (hundreds more in the Gallery area)

Flower time-lapse with Physical Sky QuickTime 1.8 MB	Snail Jesper Willumsen Image	Introduction to Physical Sky MP4 7.7 MB	Red Dragon Michael Blackbourn QuickTime 2.76 MB
Iceberg Michael Blackbourn QuickTime 4.5 MB	Dropping Spheres Michael Blackbourn QuickTime 4.75 MB	IES Lighting Explained QuickTime 6.2 MB	IES Lighting in Action Quicktime 59.6 MB
Bullets Michael Blackbourn QuickTime 1.8 MB	Blinds Michael Blackbourn QuickTime 2.4 MB

See more modo examples and other video tutorials at Luxology.tv.