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Modelling a Golf Ball (modo 203)
 
1.   Open modo and left mouse click on the sphere tool highlighted to the left. Change the sphere mode to Tesselation and set its Radius to 4.5cm for X, Y and Z. Set the subdivision level to 5 and click the apply button at the bottom of the tool properties form.
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2.   Press "d" on the keyboard to subdivide it again, creating a slightly denser mesh.
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3.   Change from the item properties list to the Info and Statistics tab. Press the little + or > beside Vertex to expand the tree. Then expand By Edge and finally, press the + beside >4. This will select all the vertices in the middle of each hexagon. These will help form the indents of a golf ball.
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4.   With the vertices still selected, press the "b" key for vertex bevel. Drag the blue handle out until you start to see the geometry break up. When you start to see this happen, reduce the amount slightly. 4.6mm was the value I used. Press the space bar to drop the bevel tool, but do not drop the vertex selection. This will help us in the next step.
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5.   With the vertices still selected, press and hold the Alt key. You will notice that where you originally had your Vertex, Edge, Polygon, Material and item selections, that these have now changed to convert. This allows you to convert your selection to any other type. Still holding Alt, click on the convert to polygon selection as shown above.
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6.   Make sure you are in polygon selection. Press "b" for polygon bevel and bevel with the following amounts:-
Shift = -400um
Inset = 3mm
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7.   Press the spacebar key to drop the bevel tool and finally press the tab key to change the mesh to Subdivision Surfaces.
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8.   Right click on your mesh item in your item list and choose rename. Rename this to "High res ". Ok, its not really that high of poly count, but its just to help us see which is which.

Now click on new item and select mesh item. Change to the new layer by left clicking on it and then left click once again on the sphere tool. Change to your toolpipe view in th elower right hand corner, and right click on the sphere tool which is mentioned in the toolpipe. Right click on this and choose apply. This will create a sphere with the exact same settings we used before. Rename this layer, "Low poly".

Now we're going to look into a bit of object baking, that will bake out the details of our "High res " object to a texture, which we can use as a normal map to apply the details to our "Low res " object.
Change to your "High poly" object, press Shift+R and click on the little blue box in the center of the handles. Scale it down slightly to match the above image.
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9.   Make sure you are still in your "High res " layer, then change to uvedit mode via Layout | Layouts | UV Edit.
You maybe greeted with the uv mess to the left, which seems to be caused via the bevels. It doesnt matter for this tutorial however, as we will be deleting the map. Press the Delete UV's button to the left to clear the map. You can also just delete the map from the vertex map list.
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10.   Switch to your "Low res " object layer.
Expand the item list to show the clips (Images in modo 301). You can either drag out the form so it shows all the tabs, or press the > and choose from the options that appear.
Click on new image, and give it the name "Golfball_Normal.TGA". Acept the default 1024x1024 map settings that appear.
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11.   Left click and hold over the newly created image in the Clips list and drag it onto the low poly sphere.
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12.   Click on the Render Settings tab at the top, and in the shadertree, locate the new map and right mouse click in its Effect column. A pop up list will appear, which will allow you to select the effect that the map will have ot the scene. Choose Normal from the list and you may also notice that your sphere changes in Open GL. This is fine, as this is a blank normal map at the moment...but we'll soon change that.

This project would not really require a normal map, but its a good technique to learn. It is mainly used in games to bake the highpoly object (which the console/pc could not work with in game) and produces a near replica of the details in an image map form. This in turn gives you fast FPS as the engine/system isnt having to deal with xMillion polys.
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13.   Left click once on the base material at the bottom of the list. Change the Dispalcement Distance to 1m as this will help capture all the details during the object baking process.
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14.   With the "Low poly" object as the active layer and the "High poly" object in the background, right mouse click on our Golfball_Normal.TGA image in the shadertree and choose Bake From Object. Modo will start to bake the details from the "High poly" sphere and apply them to the Golfball_Normal.TGA based on the "Low poly" objects UV map layout.
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15.   You will be left with a result similar to the above. Close the render window via the Close Window button. You can save it before, its really upto you. You will also note that our "Low poly" object has the normal map applied...but it looks somewhat "alien" and not like a standard golf ball. This is due to myself having the viewport set to "Texture". If I change this to Advanced Open GL, the object will look correct.
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16.   Starting to get somewhere now.
Apply the following settings to the golf ball by clicking on the base material and editing the options below:-
Diffuse = 90%
Diffuse Colour = 255, 255, 255
Fresnel = 80%
Spec = 20%
Roughness = 40%
Reflection = 5%
Press tab on the low poly object to help smooth it off.
You can now also right click on the layer "High res" and select delete.
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17.   Click on Environment and then the Add Layer button at the top of the shadertree and select Image Map.Browse to your modo 201/202/203/301 content and find the HDRI files. These by default are stored here:- \Luxology\modo 201\Content\Images\HDR\unparentProbes. Replace the 201 with 301 as needed.

Select the map, probe_yard2_FINAL.hdr and make sure its at the top of the environment shader stack order.
You will notice a Texture Layer and Texture Locator tab have appeared. Under the Texture Layer tab, you will see Low and High values. For this HDRI, a High value of 30 works well. Switch over to the Texture Locator tab, and change the Projection Type to Light Probe.
Click on the actual Enviromnent shader and chose to hide it from the camera.
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18.   The images to the left is what your HDRI's settings should look like for this scene.
   
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19.   Clicking on the Render node at the top allows you access to enable Global Illumination. If you start to see noise in your scenes, Increasing the Irradiance Rays usually smooths it out.
   
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20.   Change to your camera view and frame your shot...press F8 for a quick render test. Cool!
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21.   Press and hold the shift key and you will notice under modo tools, that the icons will change. Click on the plane item to create a standard 1m plane. It will look a little odd, as it is currently using the material that the golfball is using. To fix this, change to polygon selection mode at the top (or keep pressing space) and select the plane.

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22.   Press "m" and rename it "ground". I normally press Shift+D and use the faceted caommand twice to help dice up the large single poly. This helps modo if using micropoly displacements at render time.
With the plane still selected, press the "w" key and click on the green handle to place it so the ball is resting on it.
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23.   Go back to the shadertree and expand the ground mask by clicking on the little arrow beside its name. Click on the material within the group once, and then click on the Add Layer button above. Select Image Map and browse to an image of grass. Modo's content includes a grass texture, but I I used google images and searched for "grass texture". When your image imports to modo, you may have to change to the Texture Locator tab and set its projection to planar along the Y axis.
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24.   Re-frame your shot in the camera view and also select you directional light in the shadertree. At present, its casting a very hard edge shadow, so lets go in and change that.

You will notice that once you click on the light, its properties will appear below. Change the spread angle to between 5% and 10%, increasing the samples to 64. This will help smooth out any noise in the shadow.
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25.   Lets give the grass more depth to it. In the shadertree, click on the grass image we just applied, click on Add Layer, and select the Noise procedural. As it is above our image map, the noise will overwrite it and produce this black and white image as shown above. If the noise procedural is placed below the image map, we will only see the image map.

Right mouse click in the noise procedurals effects column and change it to bump.

Under the Texture Locator tab, set the size of the noise to 1mm for X, Y and Z.
We can leave the projection as solid as this works best with procedurals.
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26.   You should end up with something close to this render.
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27.   Ok, for the final part of the tutorial, we'll look at placing a logo image onto the golfball. Change to the paint tab as shown in the above image and press the "Add Blank Image Texture" button. A pop up window will appear for you to give the texture a name and set its size. Name it "logo" or whatever you feel like and accept the default settings.
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28.   Select the paint settings as shown above. Make sure your new logo image is selected in the shadertree and your low res uvmap is selected under the vertex map list.
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29.   Pull the tool properties bar up if you can see all the options and click on the image clip box. Load any image you wish to use as a logo. I used my little fish icon which is a .PSD file with a transparent background.
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30.   Enable projection painting and select Stamp, while disabling Repeat. Click in the 3D viewport on an empty area. The stencil will appear. If we were to click now, only the areas of the fish that cover the ball would be painted. Click and drag the little blue square that is placed to the right and is half way down our stencil.

When you get the logo to the size you desire, click on your logo image to stamp it down. If you see the map appear on the ground as well, this is because the new image we just added is above the ground mask in the shadertree. Simply drag the image below the ground mask, and all will be sorted.
   
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31.   Click on the camera in the Item List and switch to your render tab. You will see the cameras properties. Here we can adjust the focal distance, focus distance and f-stop values. For ease of use, hit the Autofocus button to get a quick DOF setup.
       
32.   Click on the Render at the top of the shadertree and click on the Settings link. Make sure Depth of Field is ticked and you may want to increase the Antialiasing (AA), to help smooth out the effect. Anything between 32-64 should do...though in some extreme DOF use, modo cannot get it clean enough and photoshop or the likes maybe needed.

Adjust your base shading rate for a cleaner result - A setting of 0.1 will give the best results combined with higher AA.
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Adjust the camera if you want again and press F9 - You'll get a result similar to the above image. I hope you have learnt something from this tutorial. It is a simple one, but covers the basics of a few features of Luxologys modo 202. Please, feel free to email me about anything in this tutorial, or post on the Luxology community forums.
Many thanks for taking the time to read through this!

Phil.

Special thanks to Stuart Hall, Brad Peebler, P.Ham and The Embassy staff inc Michael Blackbourn.
 
 
 
 

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