Power Tools:

Hold on Don't  get too excited. The powerTools_Kit is simply a restructuring of the most common commands I personally use all the time AND an attempt to organize the ones that I almost never use, so that when I do I can "generaly" find them with out 10 mintes of hunting.  

First, you may find the same tool in multiple places. For example on the first tab, "tools" you will see commands organized by component: Verts, Edges, Polys, etc.  But many of the tools here you will also find on the "modify," or "multiply," tabs. I find this organization requires less thinking than the basic "modo Tools" tool bar. So feel free to use it, or not.

But if you are trying to follow any of my tutorials and you see my interface looks different than yours, this is probably why. 

Also I have now included some bonus stuff in this kit. 14.1 PowerTools now includes

  • Kollossus Studios Locations Kit. When using the modo Physical Sun you now have a host of locations from around the world. most of which I have shot at.

  • Kollossus Studios Lens Kit. When you select the Focal Length pull down, you will find a complete list of real world lens sizes.

  • Kollossus Studios Film Back Presets.

  • Kollossus studios Overscan kit. This will add 3 overscan settings to the bottom of the camera View Properties, to instantly add 10%, 20% or 30% overscan to your camera.

  • Kollossus Studios Camera select button. There will now be a button on the Kits pallet called CAM Select. no matter how many cameras you have in your scene, this will select the Render camera.

  • Kollossus Studios Bounding Box. This is a script that will make a Bounding Box mesh item around your mesh item.

  • Kollossus Studios Zoom Factor. This will give you the Zoom Factor for your selected camera. Zoom Factor can be used to calculate the distance, from camera, that an Image plane must be to perfectly fit your camera. Make an image plane that is exactly 2x your aspect ratio. For example: a 16x9 image has an aspect ratio of 1.777. So make a plane that is X 1.777m x Y 1m then scale it to 200%. Parent and alight this to a locator that is parented and aligned to your camera. Then move it the Zoom factors distance away (probably in the negative Z direction. It should now be in perfect alignment with the camera frustum. and you can scale the locator to move the plane forward or backward. As long as the locator remains at the camera.

Download 14.1_powerTools

Installation:

  1. UnZip the download. The zip contains two files (901_powerTools.cfg, and top.cfg).

  2. Move the files into your Kits folder.

If you don't know where the folder is on your operating system, go to the main modo menu bar and  select "SYSTEM>Open Content Folder." If your Content folder is being redirected or repathed, see your sys admin. 

Side Effects: The only downside to using this config is that you may have other kits installed, like mARCH, that will add additional tabs to the default "modo tools" form. These extra tabs can be added manually to the tail of the form. at some point I will add a link to a tutorial here.