Luxology LLC on Wednesday publicly announced modo 201, a new version of their 3D modeling and rendering software for Mac OS X and Windows. It’s expected to be released in the fourth calendar quarter of 2005 and will cost US$695; upgrades from the previous release cost $295.
Improvements in modo 201 include painting tools, including hot-swappable brushes, inks, nozzles and falloffs, parametric ink, real-time bump map painting and new masking methods. New modeling features have been added like true mesh instancing, which lets users simplify and optimize complex meshes using click and drag.
Global illumination has been optimized and the performance of many other rendering features has been greatly improved. Advanced OpenGL lighting and shading has been added, including per-pixel shading, multi-texturing and real-time bump mapping. Many other changes have been made as well.