MODO and LDRAW (Part 1)

I've been spending quite a bit of time recently working with The Foundry's MODO and LDRAW.  You can get a 30 day trial of MODO from here: https://www.foundry.com/products/modo  The Foundry have a number of very high end tools that are more often used in feature films, TV and Game creation.  

Previously I've used POV-Ray as my LDRAW renderer.  Given it's age POV-Ray is a fairly good renderer and it's well integrated into the LDAW eco-system, but managing and configuring POV-Ray renders can be fairly challenging and the output can have a bit of "dated" look about it (but that might be just my lack of knowledge of POV-Ray!)   MODO's render quality is incredible "out the box" and surpasses anything that I've achieved to date with POV-Ray.  The MODO interface is a bit of beast but it's still very easy to import LDRAW models and render the images.  The main disadvantage is that you only get 30 days to play with MODO.

LDRAW access to MODO is enabled using Eric Soulvie's excellent MODO plugin - fmtLDraw  https://www.battlefleet.net/fmtldr/   This is donationware so you have to pay something for it, but it's well worth it if you want to create a few stunning renders of your digital Lego models.

This was my test model which features lots of transparency and decals and the render output here is pretty much the default - I just pressed the render button once I'd imported the file.

Here's a few more screengrabs of some of my other models imported into MODO

The only real problem with MODO is that you only get 30 days to test it.   I did email The Foundry, who said you could get a another 30 days with every new release (and there are about 3 releases a year), so you could get 90 days a year otherwise MODO is very expensive after the 30 days are up (whereas POV-Ray is free!)