From the course: Modo 2019 Essential Training

Overview of the Modo interface - MODO Tutorial

From the course: Modo 2019 Essential Training

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Overview of the Modo interface

- [Instructor] The first thing you need to know when you use a new 3D application for the first time is how to navigate the viewport. By default, Modo only uses the left mouse button for navigation purposes, there's no middle click or right click. So the default controls are hold down the alt or option key and left click to rotate the viewport. If you hold down the alt and shift keys you can pan the viewport, and if you hold down alt and ctrl keys, you can zoom the viewport. If you're more comfortable using the navigation style of a different 3D program, you can change Modo's preferences to match most other 3D applications. To do this, you need to go to the system menu and open the preferences, and then if you scroll down to the input section, you'll see there's a remapping section. And here, you'll find a mouse input preset entry, which defaults to Modo, but if you click on the menu, you can see you can change it to 3D Studio Max, Cinema 4D, or various options to mimic Maya navigation. You also have options relating to zooming with the mouse wheel, and an option for something called trackball rotation, which I'm going to explain now. To do this I'm just going to dismiss the preferences, and I'm going to hold down the alt key in order to rotate the viewport. Now the way that trackball rotation works, is that if you rotate in the center of the viewport you can see that it rotates more or less normally, but if you go to the edges of the viewport you can tumble all around your object. Now personally, I actually find this relatively difficult to control, so I tend to disable it, so what I'm going to do is to return to the system preferences, and I'm going to disable trackball rotation and I'm also going to enable the override viewport level trackball option, and that means that this preference will be now applied globally. I'm going to dismiss the preferences, and let's take a look at the Modo UI. The application is organized using these tabs which you can see here at the top. You can hide the tabs by clicking on this arrow at the top left, and if you want to reveal them again, what you need to do is to locate this little black bar between the menu items and the Modo toolbar, and when the bar highlights, simply click it to reveal the tabs again. Each one of these tabs represents a focused workspace, which allows you to do a specific task, so for example, if you wanted to do some UV unwrapping, you would click the UV tab, and that takes you to the UV layout. In order to do some animation, you might switch to the animate tab, to do some shading or rendering you might switch to the render tab. For modeling and general work, I find the Modo tab works best. You have the option to favorite tabs by means of these yellow stars here just to the left of the tab name, and doing this enables you to only display your favorites, which can make switching tabs and navigating around a lot quicker. Within the OpenGL viewport, there are different view styles that you can use. So if I come up to the top left where it says default, and I click, it opens a menu and I can switch my OpenGL view from the default view to a wireframe view. Or I could choose the reflection shading mode or the advanced shading mode, which is a higher fidelity version of the default. Or switch back to the default. You also have the option in Modo of having a different shading style for the active mesh as opposed to inactive meshes in the scene, so the active mesh is the mesh that you're currently working on and currently have selected in the item list. So I'll demonstrate this, if I select my mesh in the item list and I right click, brings up a menu and I can use this menu to duplicate my mesh. I'm going to hit the W key to activate the move tool, and just move my duplicate away from the original so we can see it in the background, and now I'm going to go back and select my original mesh once again. And now, if I hit the O key on my keyboard, it's going to bring up a 3D viewport properties popover. And if I go to the tab at the bottom, which is labeled inactive meshes, you can see that there is a checkbox against the entry, make inactive same as active. When I uncheck this, you can see that my inactive mesh has now changed to the shading style wireframe, but I can set any shading style that I like. Now, generally I tend to keep inactive same as active so I'm going to recheck this option. The most important UI elements that you need to be familiar with in Modo are the Modo toolbar which is here at the top, and this contains many of the most used functions and commands in the application. The item list, which you find here on the right hand side, and this contains all of the items in your scene. And the tabbed toolbars here on the left, which contain different tools which are grouped by category. You can also access the modeling tools at any time by hitting the F2 key on the keyboard, and this will open a floating palette with a tabbed layout with all of the tools organized by category. You can then dismiss this floating palette by clicking on the red cross or by hitting the F2 key again. So having access to this floating palette means that you can always get to your modeling tools quickly even if you're not in one of the modeling layouts. I'll quickly demonstrate by switching to the render layout, which doesn't have any modeling tools visible, but by hitting F2, I can access the modeling tools in case I need them. So this concludes our initial look at the Modo UI.

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