Here we have an extremely high poly mesh that is, in fact, a bed of small
pebbles. I have sculpted it in Mudbox.

If we double click on the mesh in polygon mode (3),
we will see it has 102400 polys.

Switch to top view (Numpad 1) and with the cube
primitive tool selected, draw out a poly plane that just covers the bed.

Make sure the plane is completely under the high poly bed and there are no
intersecting vertices.

Give the low poly plane a material and add an image map to the material
group.

Select ‘New Map’ and choose a location, name and
file format. I chose PNG because it is lossless. We do not need alpha channel,
so choose RGB. Doing so will assign a colour to the map, but we need not be
bothered about that. It will be overwritten shortly.

Change the effect to Normal.

From a side view, measure the height difference between the high poly and the
low poly geometry with the Dimension Tool.

Right click on the image name and choose ‘Bake from
Object to Texture’.

Choose a distance that is safely larger than what we measured.

Modo will bake the normal map on that texture.

Now, hide the high poly bed and just look at the low poly plane with normal
map in Advanced OpenGL view! The result looks just like the high-poly mesh!

After adding the diffuse texture:

This is how it looks without the normal map.

And this is how it looks with the normal map.

And this is the high poly mesh.

Evidently, though the low poly plane with diffuse texture only is totally
unusable, we can easily get away with the normal mapped version if the object is
not too close and viewing angle is steep.

IMPORTANT: Though Modo baked the normals on your
chosen map, the bake information is only stored in primary memory. To store it
actually into the image file, go to FILE > SAVE ALL.

That concludes the tip. I hope it was informative. For questions and/or
comments, please write me to shushens@gmail.com

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In this new tip tutorial coming from CG Cookie for Modo Cookie, we’ll take a look at Sub surface Scattering inside Modo. We’ll see how to create a simple skin shader for a goblin creature, using diffuse color, custom procedural map to control skin roughness and bump effect. We’ll see how to create a simple but efficient lighting setup using two point lights and one area light source, to render it using global illumination too. We’ll see how to use all the sub surface scattering parameters to understand how it can be used to obtain a fast skin shader.

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we’ll model sea level, basic ground and a procedural rock, then we’ll move on to light and shade it to obtain 1st final render.

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In this Modo Video tutorial we’ll see how to create a complete natural environment in Modo. We’ll see how to model it using some basic modeling features, then we’ll prepare the basic elevation model using Modo Sculpting features.

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In this new Modo Video tutorial we’ll take a look on how we have to proceed to create a simple ice shader, and then how we can modelin a very fast way a basic iceberg 3d mesh, and the apply the ice shader and put it inside the old sea scene we created in a previous tutorial.

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In this Modo video tutorial we will play around with some glass shader settings. Covering colored and frosted glass shaders.

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This is our 1st modo video tip tutorial and we’ll try to start checking basic features step by step discovering how to use it in the simplest way. This time we’ll take a look at the blurred reflection and we see some simple material editor features to create 3 simple shaders : plastic, chrome metal and a blurred chrome metal.