...

Steep learning curve, but once you get it, quickly and expressively make deep detail with minimum number of polygons.  My suggestion is, go ahead and memorize the keyboard shortcuts right away.

In a rare internet first, a person on the internet admited that they were wrong...

I would say familiarity with the app.
I'm not good at it, so I can't help you, but I heard people giving praise to it.

Well another 8 hours of messing with it, and It is certainly worth the effort to learn for the animator alone.  I am still... skeptical about the utility of the modeler.  Couple of issues though...

No alpha texture support for XNA.  This is a real bummer.  But still being able to sequence animations by clicking on them an dragging them around, then import them into xna is really nice.  However that with no alpha really bums me out...  ATM, writing my own shader would be way way way over my head...

The material editor...  What a mystifying thing, until I learned the magic of the '7' key.

Wow, the modeler is primitive...  It is like using autocad or something.  Oh wait!  Maybe someday they will finish nurbs integration?  Let me sculpt using subtractive techniques?

Finally, once you put a window in DirectX 9 View mode, it stays there..

Oh yeah, and save a lot;)

I have been using it for a while and find the Mod tool a good application for modeling content for your games. But for commercial work I still revert back to Blender 3D or 3d studio Max.

Note that all the views are available from the top menu, do you don't have to learn all the magic keys at first.

The modeler is designed for efficient and precise polygon mesh editing, not for doing CSG type modeling. There are many techniques (used both by professional film and game artists) that use these tools. You could probably find some of them for free online if you want to spend some time testing them.

Also, one question for you: do you use ModTool 6 or ModTool 7.5 ?

 

Cheers and good luck with your eval.

Yay!  I learned how to make a surface out of a shape I draw rather than using the grid primitive!

I am learning the magic keys fast enough, that I will be able to be expressive without going to all the menus;)  X, C and V were critical. 

I am using 7.5 from the announcement on these forums.

Finally the laundry list of questions...

Is there a way to bring a reference drawing in?, how about a reference video?   Either of those would be awsome.  Yes, both rotoscoping, with both pictures and movies in a particular window.

Is there some way to import DXF/DWG files, so I can retain some, most, all, of my work?  I realize the shading layers and filters will be gone, but even if I could retain the basic shapes somehow, that will have a huge impact on my workflow.  Figured out rotoscoping, and this issue is gone.

I am making cartoon characters, and environments.  What would be the prefered/possible technique to make ink lines right within Modtool?  For example, Ive modeled a house, and used the constant shader.  How do I go about putting ink lines on the edges of my house, for a cartoon look?  Wow, I figured out how to map my sprites one to one with 2d objects and the texture painter

The perfect solution for me, would be a tool/technique that makes a polygon/surface from a sprite (farseer physics does this... so I know it is possible...)...  Have a solution that is working well enough, I just map my sprites to their own polygon.

Thanks for the great free tool.  I was feeling grim about the outlook for my project.  I think I can go forward again!


On Edit: answer some of my own questions...  What a difference a day makes.