THR3aD Event - View Conference 2010 workshop

It is official: this year THR3aD will be at Torino's View Conference again, on october 29th at 2pm in the room Sella.

A two hours free workshop on the production of Creative Share 3, a way to show the main techniques used by THR3aD team and the participants.

I will be there talking about many Modo and Photoshop tricks to solve workflow problems.

In the next days we'll publish the entire event's program, the participants and some anticipation of what you'll see.

EVENT LINK

Modo Gears - Select Through and operators

Read this first

I don't like interface when I'm modeling (as well as sculpting or painting), so I tend to put in pie menus or shortcuts everything covers the main tools needed to keep a perspective view in full screen.

Luxology gave us many precompiled pie menus with lots of useful commands and tools, I know, but I found that a personal touch in everything is always a must, in a program.

This is one of the most useful shortcut I use to be faster in modeling: Select Through command on a specific pie menu.

I need to thank Joe Angell who helped me with this on Luxology forums and teach me this powerful command: "?+".

This command queries the value and simply increments it everytime the options of the tool are "true" or "false". So in this command line "tool.flag xfrm.transform select ?+", it activates or deactivates Select Through option on move/scale/rotate tools.

Using this command on a pie menu with "selection modes" and the main "action center modes" can increments our speed in modeling.

This video may shows you my way:



High resolution link

As you can see, I don't need interface and I don't need to move my cursor on the borders of my monitor to activate the main action center modes.

If you want to test my pie menu, you may download this config file, import it in Modo, assign it to a key and do some operations with your model:

Pie Menu file

Modo Gears - "Difference Grow" Selection script 1.0

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I've a nice macro here, very helpful to make holes in a mesh or something like that.

As always, put the .LXM script file in your scripts folder and assign a key (I prefer "Alt+Up arrow").

And, as always, a video to show you how it works:



A better resolution video here

Script>>

Enjoy!

Modo Gears - Edge Welder scripts 1.1

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Edited: 2010/09/18

Hi guys,

this time I want to share one of my useful scripts: the edge welder.

Well, it's not properly a script, it's just a pie menu with two edited macros, one for each different use. If you downloaded previous 1.0 scripts, update the file from the download link.

The first code merges 2 distant edges in a middle position, no more, no less.

The second code is usefull to merge partial lines of edges (it doesn't touch adiacent unselected) or complete loops, nice to merge two specular meshes.

In this video I can show you exactly what I mean:



[a better video resolution here]

To use this scripts, you must just download this zip archive:

EdgeWelder.zip

Unzip the file and:
- put the .LXM file into your scripts folder;
- load the config file in Modo;
- put the pie menu into another pie menu or assign a key to recall the scripts.


I hope you like it!

Modo Gears - Gears asset

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Welcome to the first Modo Gear!

To inaugurate this collection, I think is a good idea to talk about… gears!

This is a mini tutorial on how you may create a gear starting from a dedicated mesh asset. It's a 96 sides poly cylinder with beveled caps, a good start to generate a large set of gears. The theory is that 96 is divided by 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, so we can extrude the needed cogs dimension/number, extremely useful if two or more gears must work together.

The first step is to download this mesh and put it into your assets folder.

Modo Asset

From now, you may double click it in your preset browser and work as I do in this video.



A better resolution video here

At this level we don't need to subdivide the mesh, but we can bevel the edges if needed.