Modo: mirror

Mirroring can be done around x or y or z axis. I've used it. Will update details later

Modo: closing holes

1. Being in items mode, select the item. 
2. Pressing ctrl key, turns edges mode button to boundary button. Holding ctrl key click on boundary button. This displays open polygons count on the lower left side of the viewport as first line. 

To close open polygons:
 

1. On the right side displayed panels, Select Lists tab, statistics tab -> edges -> by boundary -> geomtry. 
2. Geomentry displays how many edges are open and how many are selected. Uless you closed some of the eges using the 4th step, both numbers would be same.
3. Click on the plus icon displayed before the geometry option so that it highlights in white color. Geomentry calculates how many edges are open and how many are selected. Unless you closed some of the eges using the 4th step, both numbers would be same.
4. Place mouse ponter on the view port and press p key. This tries to close the open edges.
5. Click on the view port to unselect the selected eges.
6. Repeat steps from 3 till Geometry displays 0 count.

modo join two edges with bridge tool

be in edges mode
select the two edges to join
select tools menu -> edge side menu -> bridge. This joins the two edges with a polygon.
bridge properties menu -> segments option allows you to specify how many polygons should come between the two selected edges.

modo thicken tool

be in polygon mode

1. Turn on Polygons mode button
2. select the polygons you want to thicken
3. select  tools menu -> polygon side menu -> thicken. Click on the selected polygon. This displays offset arrow pointer exactly perpendicular to the selected polygon.
4. I had to align work plane with thickening surface, otherwise the blue handle which has to thicken also scaling while thickening. Without aligning work plane, you can thicken the surface by changing action center to local or element or automatic. automatic option working unreliably for multi polygon scenario. local option is working well for multi polygon, but if the polygons connected angle is more than some degrees, then scaling grows those polygons disjointly creating gap between them. Element option worked well, even those disjointly grown polygons got connected with new polygons to keep them jointly. sometimes element behaving like local option. This might a bug in the software.
5. i had used action center -> selection option
6. adjust the offset values or drag the pointer. this thickens the polygon.

when modo's thicken tool used, the object file size has become very big around 130mb. When I used geomagic wrap to thicken the object, it occupied just 17mb.

I am using action center -> Automatic option. Didn't do any work  plane alignments. My purpose of thickening the item is to subtract another item from this item using boolean operation. Boolean operation is working well only when this item has huge thickness than the subtracted item. Otherwise boolean operation getting terminated in the middle.

modo: subtract operation

the items to be used with Boolean operation should be in different Meshes.

1. create a box in mesh1
2. create a sphere in mesh2 (n key creates new mesh. ctrl+left-click on sphere icon in basic tab of tools menu creates sphere)
3. being in Items mode, left-click on the box and shift+left-click on the sphere to select both items.
4. select Tools menu -> mesh edit -> commands panel -> Boolean, this displays a boolean dialog box. In the dialog box, select Operation as Subtract and Drive mesh as Last Selected. click the ok button.
5. As the box is the first selected and sphere is the last selected, sphere gets subtracted from other selected items, leaving a hole in the box.

Modo subtract operation works only when mesh1 and mesh2 items are closed surfaces.If either of them is not closed then subtract operation fails with a dialog mentioning the mesh name which is not closed. In such case to find the holes select ctrl + boundary (polygon mode button), which displays all the holes on the mesh. If a mesh is closed it would be continuous, it won't have any boundaries. If a mesh has boundary then it's open. Open mesh can't get printed on 3d printers.

The subtract operation results in new meshes. When a subtract operation divides an item into two, the divided parts might be open. If the subtract operation results in open parts, subtract operation ends with a message informing the new parts are open.

When a subtract operation divides an item into two, the split parts still get selected as a single item in item mode. To individually select either part of the divided item, change to polygon mode and double click on the part you want to select then copy and paste it into a new mesh.

I tried to do the same operation using Mesh Fusion, but fusion subtraction is working using subdivision algorithms, where a new subd shape of the box is created and sphere got subtracted from the newly created subd shape. Because of this I didn't like Mesh Fusion. In fusion the item being subtracted is attached to the top brown circle. The source item is attached to the lower gray circle. in fusion i used the option "subtract others from first selected".

Modo is hanging while doing subtract operation in items mode. Replace step 3 with the below steps:

1. being in Polygons mode, in Item list tab,  left-click on mesh1 and shift+left-click on mesh2.
2. in 3d view, double click on mesh1 to select all the mesh1 polygons and double click on mesh2 to select all the mesh2 polygons

modo drawing a curve with polygons

1. select Tools panel -> basic -> sketch
2. select from tools properties panel sketch -> type -> lines
3. holding the left click drag on the 3d view whichever arc shape you want and press q to quit the tool
4. Being in edges mode, select all the edges of the arc. select Tools panel -> edge -> extend and click on the already selected arc. It displays directional arrows. Drag the arrow in which direction you want to extend the arc. This provides polygons to the arc. for my case I need not change action center value as the desired drag direction matches with the direction of x, y and z axes of the workplane. If the drag direction is different from workplane, changing action center -> element and right clicking on any surface displays directional lines aligned to that surface. This helps to move the selected surface relative to the direction of another surface.
5. as the arc is drawn with lines, curve might not appear really curve. if somewhere curve is looking sharp, being in edges mode select that sharp edge, then select Tools panel -> edge -> bevel, holding the left button drag on the panel so that the sharp edge becomes smooth.

if any time you want to see the vertices use ctrl+1 -> toggle vertices. As this option highlights vertices, any complex object with too many vertices get displayed as a collection of black points, with reduced clear identification of its shape. If any time you notice an item being displayed in black color, then treat it as toggle vertices option being turned on

use m key to change the color of items in different meshes. when you are drawing a line along an item, colors help in clearly distinguishing one from other.

Tools panel -> edge -> extend creates a new set of edges along with the vertices. Move those newly created edges in whatever direction you want without disturbing the already existing structure.

Any polygon has only one face, which won't be visible from backside. If you want to see it from backside, being in Polygons mode tools menu -> polygon side tab ->  commands panel -> flip, flips front to the back


i found drawing using sketch tool along a shape is difficult as sketch tool adds a new vertex wherever left button is released. I felt less comfortable. rather than the sketch tool use the vertex tool.

1. put vertices along the shape, using the Tools panel -> basic tab -> vertex tool. To see the placed vertices turn on ctrl+1 -> toggle vertices.
2. select 2 verts, hit 'p', that'll create edge 
3. Being in edges mode, select all the edges of the arc. select Tools panel -> edge -> extend and click on the already selected arc. It displays directional arrows. Drag the arrow in which direction you want to extend the arc. This provides polygons to the arc. for my case I need not change action center value as the desired drag direction matches with the direction of x, y and z axes of the workplane. If the drag direction is different from workplane, changing action center -> element and right clicking on any surface displays directional lines aligned to that surface. This helps to move the selected surface relative to the direction of another surface.

modo sculpting

1. ctrl + tab allows you to change between views. Using it change to paint view. 
2. change to vertex mode. in other mode things are not working
3. first select the suitable brush. various brush types are displayed in the left side sculp tools panel. I like the smooth brush.
4. adjust brush size using right click + drag. ctrl + right click + drag to adjust bias. bias is shown by the red color displayed inside the brush circle. It indicate how sharp the curve will fall from the center to the border of the brush circle.
5. push is my favorite tool. select the push button in sculpt tools panel. then left click + drag either pulls or pushes the vertices. Be default it pulls up. Hold ctrl button to push down. change. when you select the push button in the sculpt tools panel, it displays a group of controls on lower part of the sculpt tools panel and a small floating offset control panel on the center lower part of the 3d view. in the displayed controls, normal mode and smooth mode drop downs are important.
6. push pull or push does in which direction depends on the normal mode drop down. if normal mode drop down has average as selected, then average of all the normals under the brush is taken and in the direction pushing or pulling happens.
7. use the floating offset slider to modify the how much impact one pull/push request will do.
8. after applying pull or push to smooth the surface hold shift key + left click + slide. You can also do this by explicitly selecting the smooth button in the sculpt tools panel and left click + slide on the area you want to smooth.

fusion 360: convert stp files to stl files

The “application bar -> new design from file” menu option only taking my .stp, .igs files. Files imported through this option are being displayed as a collection of faces, when I hover mouse over it faces get highlighted and I could select individual faces. This file can be converted to STL format by selecting in the browser “bodies -> right click on the mesh body to convert -> save as STL”. Then a dialog appears on the right hand side of the screen with some more options to confirm. In that dialog you can select medium or high detail and click on ok.

modo701's Sculpting Tools - part 1 of more to come

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4pqhhmUrNg

The transform tool is not sculpting tool, but it can be used for very rough, very quick sculpting like stuff. But if you really want to be creative you’ve to use sculpting tools.

Now I am in the paint layout tab. But In fact you don’t need that tab at all. It may be a good starting point because in the lower right part of the screen you can see how your brush is looking like. And you can adjust the settings of the brush and see what these settings do. But you can open the sculpting palette anywhere on the program by pressing the f3 key. That will open little floating sculpting tool palette and you can access all of the sculpting tools in one.

The first tool we want to have look at is move tool. Because usually you will start by creating primitive optic on screen and move it into position, move the corner move the rough form into whatever you want to create.

Some basic functions that you will constantly need to adjust is size of the brush and bias. The bias means how sharp the bush will fall off to its corner to its outer rim. Now you can adjust these parameters from the little head of the display from the heart in the center of the screen which by the way you can switch on and switch off by the button in the upper left corner but I think using the right mouse button to increase or decrease the size of the brush is much more convenient. And if you hold down the ctrl key on the keyboard and use the right mouse button you can adjust the bias. Again the bias is for the sharpness or strength of the fall off of the brush. Now you can see me playing around with the settings brush size as well as bias and you can watch what settings are doing to my test scene on the screen. But you should play around with the settings just like in Photoshop you are using your stylus to draw anything you have to find your own settings for brush size and bias especially for pressure sensitivity to which we will come later.

Now in the lower right hand part of the screen you can see some optical representation of the brush. The first is the brush seen from the buff circle the sharper the circle is the higher the biases. Second part is the brush seen from the side something to say about that just for moment and you can see how soft how round the edges will be created. The height of the brush or let’s say how much geometry you are actually editing depends either on the pressure you are applying or on the offset value. The offset actually means how deep the brush will penetrate into the mesh or how much of the data downwards from the brush will be effected.

So the height in this lower right hand part or lower right hand display actually was to the offset. You can adjust offset from the heart or from the head of the display or you can use the middle mouse button to adjust the offset and Modo will display some yellow line showing how deep the brush will actually penetrate. Now for me the offset setting by the middle mouse button often stops. I don’t know why I’ve to use the heart from time to time to adjust the offset. It should also be noted that the offset value only makes sense when you are in adaptive or relative sculpting mode not in absolute mode. I will talk about that later. Function you will use quite often to smooth out whatever you have done to even out the geometry. You can access the smooth brush by holding down the shift key and just left mouse button pen clicking on whatever you want to adjust. You can actually put the smooth function on other qualifiers I will show you how that works in a moment but in general you will have it on the shift key and just smooth out any something you should keep in mind is the brush size.

The brush size is relative to the screen. That means if you zoom in on the mesh the brush will actually effect less geometry if you zoom out it will effect more geometry. It will always effect what you have seen in the red circle of the brush. So keep that in mind when you are trying to adjust very small parts of your geometry and zoom out because suddenly your brush will get much more effective. Let me clean up some of the mess on the mesh that I made here to show you the basic brush types that are available. I think in most cases you will use the brush with the soft edge because by just clinking up the bias you actually get a brush with harder edge but if you want to you can directly use harder edge brush. You can use procedural or spherical brushes for somewhat sophisticated functions that is another story we will tell another time.

Related stuffing has an image brush actually loaded in an image alia so let me just show you this little life rescale and rotation tool that is the second button just right to the image button. If you use both buttons at the same time you can use the image button rotated and rescaled on the fly. And the last brush type here is just a normal text brush you can type nearly any text you want and just stump it on your mesh or use it as mask and again that is another story and shall be told another time.

If I recap what we learned about move tool then I would say use the move tool to get the first basic rough shape of your mesh into form and use the right mouse button to adjust the brush size you are dealing with and use ctrl and right mouse button to adjust the bias or sharpness of the brush. You can use middle mouse button or offset slider on the heart to increase or decrease offset and the offset defines how much geometry is effected by a brush. The last but not least use the shift key to smooth whatever you’ve did.

So let’s move onto the push tool. For me the push tool is the most powerful sculpting brush in Modo. Even prefer to scoff and coff and whatever but those are different stories we shall be told another time. The only thing we really can’t do with push tool is moving geometry but then again Modo has a move tool for that. Now the push tool if you activated will just push in or pull out geometry wherever you press it on the mesh. Just like with the move tool you can adjust the brush size with the right mouse button and bias or sharpness of the brush with ctrl and right mouse button. By the way pushing or pulling if you just press down then you are pushing the geometry because the tool is called push tool. If you hold down the ctrl key then you are pulling along the normal and we will talk about normal mode in a moment also you can use the offset to define how deep or how far the brush will penetrate into the mesh or pull the geometry out of the mesh. The push tool is good way of showing the difference between adaptive and absolute offset mode. In Adaptive mode which is standard mode the pressure you’ve applied to the pen will be transhot into some relative pressure on the screen and the presented you type with just middle mouse button for the offset defines if it’s strengthening your pressure or its weakening your pressure and how the pressure will be calculated. Push into the mesh or how far the brush will pull out geometry from your mesh. And you can type in any arbitrary measurement meters inches defining the maximum value that the brush will effect. Understanding how the normal mode works is important to get full control over what your brush is doing to the geometry. The standard mode is average. Average just means that all the normal of the geometry underneath your brush will be taking into consideration. And when you press or pull on the geometry the action will take along this average normal. So as you can see on the screen average actually follows the contour of the mesh I am working on. But if you want to create some concave structure very sharp edge average won’t help anyway. So If you switch to let’s say screen the normal along which the geometry will be modified is taken from your actual screen rotation. So actually you brush will push or pull straight forward from where you look at and that is a very great way of sharply defining where the geometry is pushed to.

And having understood that the other modes are quite easy to understand this as well. Brush center of course uses normal underneath the brush center vertex uses the normal of the every vertex you are running over. Mouse down is little bit tricky to use because it uses the normal when you start the stroke and carries that along while you pressing down.

Let us start about the density mode. But first let me clean up the mesh once again shift key your friend. Density mode is attenuated that means that if you run over the same area with one brush stroke without stopping the stroke the limit up to which the geometry will be filled up or pushed or pulled is defined by the percentage of your offset or by the offset value. But if you switched to edit mode there is no limit you just keep on pushing or pulling the geometry out or in depending on how option you run over the same area. Note there is no geometry added you are just moving vertices up or down. The other two modes take their limits from the maximum offset amount you have to define just as if you pressed with maximum pressure or from the maximum value in the displacement map. Now the displacement map comes into play when you are using subdivision or multiresolution sculpting that is a different story and will be told another time.

Let us have a look at a standard bush stroke. You can see all those little bumps and those bumps are created because there is no continuous transfer of positions of the pen to the editing on the screen. If I increase the interpolation value then even less positions from my mouse or from my pen are used to create editing blobs. In order to connect those blobs I can switch on the continuous strokes and that will just join or connect those single steps those single positions Modo asks from my pen. So it’s if you want to create a continuous smooth stroke decrease the interpolation value and switch on continuous stroke. That may slow down Modo on geometry with lot of polygons. Of course and there may be times when you actually want to have a set of very straight lines where you just increased the interpolation and switch on continuous strokes to get some jaggy lines on your geometry. Now by switching on nozzle note all you get all those additional controls down here. And that means you can control what the pressure of your stylus is doing what the tilt of your pen is doing. The first value interacts with your operating system’s sensitivity of your stylus. So I won’t get into detail here. You have to just try it out because your operation system will have its own setting for sensitivity. The strength will in most cases be best set to pressure because the harder you press the deeper the brush will penetrate into the geometry and by combining pressure and size and speed you can create calligraphy like strokes on the screen which can be quite nice. The rotation function allows you to align the normals of strokes making to the direction in which you are moving. You have to actually try that out fair it to the heart.

Now let us move to the topic of multires subdivision sculpting. So far I have been using non subdivided mesh and the main reason for that is that you can see what the brush strokes are what the tools are actually doing to the geometry. By simply switching on multires you are creating an invisible displacement map in the background that Modo will use to edit subdivision surfaces on your mesh and that will give you of course a lot smoother control over your sculpt but you don’t have direct control over the polygons or the vertices you are influencing and that is the reason why so far I am using a nonsubdivided mesh. You can control subdivision level by pressing one of the two arrows up or down. You can see the actual level in the multires display but I would always have an eye on the polygon count on the lower right hand corner of the screen because the multires level is some kind of abstract.

Finally let us have a look at the masking functions in the Modo sculpting tools. If you want to use masking you have to use a multires mesh. It doesn’t work with non subdivided non multires mesh. To activate the painting for the mask by just clicking on the paint function and then you have the standard mouse function with the right mouse button to adjust the brush size and the bias and just paint on the mask. The mask you paint it will define what part of the mesh is not influenced by your brush. If you want invert that behavior if you want to adjust what you paint it on you’ve to invert the mask. So it’s really easy to define what areas of the mesh you want to adjust and what to not. And since the bias or the fall off at the b of the brush is respected you get a smooth fall off smooth transition from the masked area to the non masked area. But beware there is a situation I went into a couple of times so I am able to give this little warning: sometimes if you clear the mask you’ve no mask on the screen, you’ve nothing visible and you can’t adjust your mesh you have no idea why that is. Have a look if you have invert mask active because that will actually when everything masked off not adjustable. Just crack that and you are good to go.