MODO | BabylonDreams Pipeline Kit

I have been steadily working away on my own internal pipeline kit. This modo plugin was borne to help with our in-house CAD visualization and animation projects and thus is mostly filled with goodies that help with large CAD datasets and animation projects.

At this time the kit has the following features:

• Modeling & Rigging
  • Re-Route Instances (switch out the source item of one or many instances)
  • De-Instance (turns any instances to meshes but leaves other items types alone)
  • Instance Source Center Adjust (works on fresh CAD imports and allows moving the center of the source item without the instances flying off into space)
• Animation
  • Record GL (a better more powerful GL recording then the default modo one)
  • Bake Camera Hierarchy and Export as FBX (for those times when you need a simple camera with animation curves no matter how complex the camera hierarchy)
  • Transfer Animation (copy the animation from one item to another wholesale including user channels)
  • Transfer Animation Hierarchy Workflow (transfer the animation of complete rig assets by saving the animaiton to disk and then re-applying it to other scenes or updated rig assets)
• Shading
  • Fix Orphans (fixes orphaned and hence invisible materials in the Shader Tree)
  • Create Per Material RenderOutputs (great for creating alpha or color masks for compositing)
  • Blend Hierarchy (a workflow for dissolving many items in a hierarchy at once)
  • Blend Arbitrary (a workflow for dissolving many unrelated items at once)
  • BBox Instance Toggle (turn selected or all scene instances to a bounding box display for speed or back to normal again at the click of a button)
• Rendering
  • Split Blends into Passes (Will at some point split a scene up that has been animated with the Blend Hierarchy setup into passes for rendering and also output a XML file that allows After Effect or Premiere or similar to import a fully assembled edit of the passes again. But that's still far in the future. For now it uses the setup from Blend Hierarchy to output an overview of all the blend ranges in the scene.)
  • Adjust Overscan (one button overscan adjustments)
  • Update Render Paths (create render paths based on scene name and project location)
  • Headless Batch Creator (create all files necessary for batch rendering and if requested start a background render)
  • Open Selected renderOutput's Folder (opens an Explorer/Finder window at the output path)
• Scripting
  • Version Up Scene (smarter version up then the built in modo one)
  • Version Up Scene with Comment (same as above, but with additional comment attached to file name)
  • Clear Log (one click Master Log clean up. Useful for scripting.)

The whole kit comes with extensive documentation for each function.

I am planning to release this to a wider audience in the future and would welcome feature requests or ideas of what else might be worth including. Shoot me a mail if you are interesting in this.

Here is an extensive overview of the current functionality:

Edit (2018-10-01): The kit has now been officially released. Read the official announcement on this site or head over to the BabylonDreams Pipeline Kit web site to get your copy.