The day was spent re-factoring a lot of code and moving things around so all the game logic plays well with the menus and the menus play well with the game logic. So, I am back at programming for my game.
I have been looking into Modo for the last few days and I must say that I am sold, and am going to transition from using Maya LT to use Modo 701 with its wonderful MeshFushion plugin. The more time I spent looking into Modo the more hours, even days I could see have been saved if I had used it from the beginning. It has some wonderful modeling and animation tools, and has not had a large bulk of its features neutered for the indie developers. The price is about twice that of Maya LT, but since I was just using the LT subscription model I can simply just cancel that.
I can still use .fbx files as the main target files for export out of Modo for Unity, so that will not cause any problems for me. Other nice thing that Mode does give you, is a complete python API for its SDK. Which will allow me to create any addition or enhancements quite easily.
Other wonderful feature would be its asset viewer, where you can create prefabs out of your items and assemble bigger pieces from those very easily. Create detailed geometry pieces that are just then exported as displacement and bump maps. Its duplication tools, pattern selections and various other goodies are making it hard to ignore.
One of the biggest gripes I have had with Maya LT is that its skinning for my rigid bodies is very unforgiving and it assumes that you are just dealing with a simple continuous mesh. Mesh pieces sometimes just disappear and its material assignment starts flickering. I have actually had to remove and re-add Materials so that it picks up the correct material and exports the correct material.
I have been a Maya user since 1999, when Maya was in its 2.0 version. Very weathered in its workflow for modeling, animation and texturing. Have also used its API quite a bit to create various plugins and enhancements for it. It has a lot of strengths, and most of them are in its extensibility and animation tools.
But it is just not enough, so I am picking up a younger model.
V 