In Terminus, Luxology's modo 301 was used to create CG characters, like this concrete column character. All Terminus images © Trevor Cawood/Spy Fims/The Embassy VFX.

modo Operandi
While Hole in the Paper Sky opted for unobtrusive vfx, other short films are quite out-front with their effects.

Terminus, a short film from The Embassy by director Trevor Cawood (Spy Films), used Luxology's modo 301 for a number of vfx, including painting, texturing and UV unwrap tools to create CG characters that represent various urban installments and materials.

Terminus (Latin for "boundary stone") addresses the alienation experienced in a modern urban environment, telling the story of a 1970s businessman who inadvertently offends a strange and ambiguous entity that accosts him on his way to work, and the man's rapid descent into madness following the encounter.

In addition to human actors, Terminus features a dancing concrete column character, a wall-crawling airport baggage turnstile character and an information kiosk character.

modo was one of several 2D and 3D tools employed on Terminus. "modo is playbox for artists and breaks down most of the barriers that artificially separate artistic functions like modeling, sculpting, painting etc.," explains Bob Bennett, VP of marketing, Luxology. "You can them when you want, at your whim."

The visual effects team on Terminus made extensive use of modo 301's new painting, texturing and UV unwrap tools to create CG characters. Courtesy of Luxology. 

Bennett says that modo is configured with a set of layouts that allows artists to use its functions completely independently. "Some people just modo as a 3D painter and do not do any modeling with it," Bennett adds. "Many, many people use modo as a renderer."

"It is straightforward to use these functions because they all share common technologies," Bennett continues. "The painting is really sculpting. Sculpting is really a first cousin of modeling. Many of these features are just a different way of leveraging more fundamental capabilities of modo like moving vertices. You can move vertices manually by selecting them and triggering the move command, or you can use the 'push' to tool in modo to organically move vertices in one sculpting operation. Once you become accomplished at using modo, you may wish to explore the 'toolpipe' in modo. That is where you can build your own variations of the commands."

VFX Supervisor Tristam Gieni says that modo has been an integral part of The Embassy's modeling pipeline for several years. "We were eager to use it on Terminus. modo 301's new painting, UV unwrap and sculpting tools saved us significant time and allowed us to achieve excellent results without having to traverse several other software packages. Being able to sculpt right within the modo environment really simplified our workflow as well. We're also impressed with modo's OpenGL performance -- being able to paint texture maps and view our work in realtime was a tremendous asset."