Goodbye, plucky underdog
I have been a Modo user for many years, and a pretty vocal and passionate one at that. I loved Modo, I loved the community around the app, I loved Luxology, and I loved the vibe and the ethos that Brad Peebler and the crew created.
This is pretty normal for a Modo user. The founders created a spirit that resonated strongly with the community, and that carried goodwill for many years, even after the company was sold to Foundry, who never really understood what they had bought when they made the purchase.
Most Modo users felt the way I did.
But it wasn't just about vibes, Modo as an app was a joy to use. A great UI, well-designed tools, and a genuinely fun workflow. There were issues, particularly with performance, but for most users working in lighter scenes working in Modo was fun. (But of course, for those who were working with more demanding scenes, it could be anything but fun).
So for the thirteen years that Foundry developed Modo things just chugged along. Many of us bemoaned the lack of community fostered by the new owners, but we stuck around, even as others bailed. Over the course of this decade-and-a-bit the userbase thinned out as users dropped off, some searching for more technical and capable apps such as Houdini, others running to the relative safety of Cinema 4D or Maya. A few also switched to Blender, particularly after the refresh of Blender 2.8 which finally made the app more approachable.
But we, the faithful, stuck with our beloved Modo. Even though the writing was obviously on the wall. Staff leaving, resources being shrunk, and development slowing. We stayed loyal, because we loved the software, and were nostalgic for the vibe that once was.
And then, of course, one day the axe just fell.
It was inevitable.
A decade after buying Modo, something they didn't really understand, Foundry cut their losses.
What Foundry never really understood wasn't so much Modo as a software application, it was Modo as a community. A hyper-engaged user base that they seemed to regard as a nuisance, rather than the incredible asset that it was.
When your users are passionate about your product, that's a good thing. That's an insanely great thing in fact. A very rare thing. But they slowly squandered all that goodwill because they never knew what to do with it. They let the community, and Modo, wither on the vine.
Foundry are a corporate company, who deal with corporate clients. Film studios, effects houses, production companies. Nuke costs about the same as a second-hand car, it's not something many individuals can afford to buy. So the business model is different. It's account managers, purchase orders, a mostly faceless relationship between large companies. A business model that brings in large, and regular, payments.
Modo didn't fit that mould, at all. Modo had a userbase, made up of individual people. People that Luxology had built a relationship with, people who cared about the vibes. It wasn't that Foundry didn't care about the vibes, they never understood that there even was a vibe to care about. It's not something their business could ever really deal with, let alone nurture.
So here we are.
Modo as we knew it will not be coming back.
I've been dabbling with Blender for about five years by now. Partly out of curiosity, and partly because it could do a few things that Modo couldn't, such as fluid dynamics.
Of course for the most part I stayed in Modo, and only used Blender occasionally. I learned the basics, especially the shading side, but anything tricky would usually be done in Modo.
But once Modo was killed off I knew that the writing was on the wall. Staying inside my Modo comfort zone was no longer viable. The time had now come to dive deeper into Blender and learn it for real.
And then something I hadn't expected happened.
As I learned my way around Blender, a task I approached by trying to replicate some of my favourite Modo workflows, I started to have fun. I found some things in Blender that I actually preferred. The knife tool, for example, was a pleasure to use, and much more reliable than the cut tool in Modo.
I also found it was possible to do more or less all of the same things in Blender that I liked to do in Modo. There was an equivalent to the Workplane with the 3D Cursor. You could set the orientation to a specific element. But most of all I found that once I got over the initial hurdles I was enjoying myself in Blender just as much as I had in Modo. So rather than focus on petty frustrations, I decided to just accept Blender as it is, and just get on with doing 3D the Blender way.
Of course there are still things I miss in Modo. Primitives, for example, are much more flexible and fully featured. And precision modelling is less hassle (partly because the primitives are more, er, primitive in Blender so it's fiddlier to place them just so). But really these issues are just niggles. On the whole Blender is a great application that is only going to get better. We can't say the same for Modo.
Life moves on, and so must we. I loved Modo, and will miss it, but Modo is the past, and Blender is the future.