All images from The Official Luxololgy modo Guide, Version 301 © Course Technology.

This month, VFXWorld continues excerpting a series from the Thomson Course Technology book The Official Luxology modo 301 Guide, which will give VFXWorld readers a chance to build, layer, model, animate, texture and render with modo. Skills are taught using projects that take the reader from simple modeling to complex tasks, taking advantage of various tools and options along the way.

In Chapter 6, you modeled something a little untraditional in a corkboard with Post-it Notes. While most projects work through modeling a full 3D object, it's a good idea to think beyond the norm. The corkboard project was a lesson in working with the Items tab, but it was also designed to trigger your thought process. While most of us head into a 3D modeling program to create cars, character heads or telephones, the project in Chapter 6 was a little less conventional, but a cool project just the same, and we'll put our own twist on it here.

In the previous chapter, you learned how to build objects and work with the Items tab. You learned how to rename an object in the Items tab and how to create materials. You also learned that if you press the Shift key and click on a primitive shape (such as a cube), you get a new mesh item called Cube. By pressing m and entering a name, you are assigning a material to these polygons. What modo is actually doing are two things:
 

[Figure 1] The default Shader Tree tab is your home for all surfacing and render control.

• Creating a polygon material selection set out of these polygons -- You can see them in the Info list under Polygon, Material.

• Creating a new group layer in the Shader Tree that is linked to this selection set -- This linkage of a group layer and a set of polygons (or an item or item hierarchy) is called a mask. A mask makes sure that all the material and texture layers in that group are applied only to those linked polygons or item(s). If you choose a material from the drop-down menu that already exists, then you are just adding those polygons to the existing selection set and its associated mask.