Live Stream | MODO 13.2 Developer Chat

Join MODO Product Manager Shane Griffith, Chief Architect Matt Cox, Mike Jensen and me….Thundarr The Barbarian, in a fireside live stream chat about MODO 13.2’s features, stability and future development.

Summary from Warren L over on the Foundry Forums.

Some of the things mentioned:

• Modo stability over time
• USD
• Python 3
• QT
• Better frameworks to integrate third party technologies
• Improved GPU utilisation by mPath
• Shader Tree organisation
• Mesh Fusion UI and usability
• Reducing and batching events
• Viewport objects and deferred updates for procedurals
• Hiring more developers

Modo stability over time
To keep those graph bars going up, look at these:

399246 Dragging User Channels from an items properties into the Schematic Viewport can crash Modo ("In Progress")
407380 Pressing delete while editing text sometimes deletes the following item instead which can also result in a crash
409741 Crash with scene using Replicator

Those account for 90% of my crashes, and that’s with me actively trying to avoid them.

Crash bugs naturally have priority, but there are lots of feature bugs too.

How are you doing on other metrics like new issues, open issues, fix rates, etc.

QT
Matt talked about not being able to take features from their other products because they’re QT and Modo isn’t. If Modo migrates to QT, what features might Modo pilfer?

USD
The plan is to tackle USD in three phases:

Phase 1: File I/O
Phase 2: Hydra-compatible viewport
Phase 3: Referencing

I’m looking forward to Phase 3. I take it referencing includes variants, overrides, purposes, massive scaling, deferred loading, etc. For a good overview of USD, see https://graphics.pixar.com/usd/overview.html

Unity and Unreal need to release a Hydra-compatible viewport renderer.

Better frameworks to integrate third party technologies
Third parties do seem to have a harder time creating and maintaining plugins for Modo than they do for other DCCs. The chat seemed to focus on viewports and rendering, though.

Shader Tree organisation
There was mention of Greg Brown working on Shader Tree organisational features. I was intrigued by this and would of liked to hear more. I wasn’t aware it was a problem needing solving. Performance with lots of shaders appears to be a bigger user pain-point.

Viewport objects and deferred updates for procedurals
Generating procedurals and viewport meshes on background threads sounds like a great solution. I have procedural meshes taking 15 seconds to generate; plain ol’ speeding-up-the-existing-code wouldn’t have made much of a difference.