modo has a powerful way of dealing with GUI, viewports and forms. With all this power of customization comes the disadvantage of losing your favorite pie menus, color scheme or viewports. This is a tutorial on how to setup modo with your customized configs so you don't need to be afraid of losing them. This will also make it really easy to move from one computer to another or even run modo from an USB-stick. And modo will work a lot smoother with a fresh config each time you start. 

 -Folder structure

 -Config creation 

 -Change asset path 

 -Shell script to be able to run modo 

 -Costume icon 

-The ability to run several instances of modo 

NOTE 

This article is written for mac osx, but can easily be applied for windows.

NOTE 

You're free to create your hierarchy structure how ever you like it. 

This is how my folder hierarchy looks like: 

Some of the folders speaks for themselves, but some of them may be a bit abstract. In the buckets I keep the buckets from the render, if I've that checked on. In configs I store all my customized configs, i.e. all my viewports, forms, viewport colors, remapped keys and other preferences. Then to the frames folder modo writes the 10 temp images that you can switch between in the render window. Then last, but probably most important, there is the startUP folder. In here I only have two files, one of them is modo's license file and the other one is a config file that tells modo where to find all my other configs, it tells modo what viewport to start up with and here I also keep all of my directory paths, so I easily can change them all if I move to a pc or an other machine. 

This is what I'm calling the config file in my startUP folder. This is also the config file that I'm replacing modo's default config file with. My import401.cfg is set to read only, this is important, because it stops modo from filling this file up with data that I don't want. This config file is what I'm replacing modo's default config file with. So if I don't set it to read only, modo will fill this file up with information like last viewport changes and to me information that I rather see being reset each time I start modo. This will also make sure that modo gets a fresh config file each time. Now you don't need to be afraid of playing around with forms and viewports, because it'll not get saved unless you export a separate config file. This is how my import401.cfg looks like: 

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

It's pretty straight forward, the only two tags that may be a bit abstract are the <atom type="Frame"> and the <import>resource:</import>. The first one just tells modo with which viewport it should start up with. The other one is due to when you have the import401.cfg file set to reed only. Then the modo resource configs wont be imported. So you need to add new import tags to the resource, script modules, config file etc.

The lines that looks like this are just xml comments that allows me to fast take this config and make it work under a windows platform. 

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Let’s start from scratch so we know that we are exporting clean config files. So delete your two user config files found in:

HDD/User/<UserName>/Library/Preferences/ 

and they're called: 

 com.luxology.modo.plist 

 com.luxology.modo40X

THEORY 

Really it's just one of them that you "need" to remove. That's the .modo302 file, this contains the information of all your viewports, forms, viewport color and so one. The other file (.plist) contains more of the osX side of things like which last file you saved in which folder and so one. It's the .modo302 file that we're replacing with the import.cfg file. So when we're done with this setup, this .modo40X file won’t even get created. 

2... 

Now create one viewport. Make sure you only create one. Then export it as a new config file. You'll find the export under File > Config Export... 

Place the file in its tight folder, i.e. the config folder, name it something like Layout_xxxx.cfg 

4... 

Now start with your second viewport and keep on building until your have all your viewports in separate config files. .NOTE One thing to have in mind is that you want to check Append to File and uncheck the Import Resulting File. To be on the safe side you could even delete the user config, com.luxology.modo401, after each time, or even force quite modo after you exported the config. What that will do is that it will prevent modo from saving the changes to the user config. Cause you want to be sure of that you don't have duplicated configurations, this can cause modo to crash and that's what’s happening sometimes to modo's own config, com.luxology.modo401. 

The same concept goes for preferences, remapped key, viewport color etc...  

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BACKGROUND 

Forms are where you store things like menus and controllers. I like to have many different menus for different things, so it quickly adds up. And I don't like to save one file for every menu. Therefore I create a container where I place all of my different menus. 

Create a new form and give it a name like "my menus" or "container". 

2... 

Now this is your menu parent. Now create your menus and make them children of your container. This is done simply by dragging and dropping your menus into your container. 

3... 

When you're done select your container and then go up to Save Form... and save the new config file to your config folder. 

NOTE 

I like to be able to quickly tell the difference between a layout config, color config, form config etc. Therefore I always have a prefix in front of my config files. So this I would name something like Form_Container.cfg 

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 Now we'll create a shell script, this will make it so you don't have to type codes in the terminal every time you want to launch modo. In the script we'll redirect modo's default license and config path to our own. 

1... 

Make a text file (must be a plain .txt file) with:

 "/path/to/modo.app/Contents/MacOS/modo" "-config:/path/to/config/import.cfg" "-license:/path/to/license/folder" 

You can also add other flags like: 

-cmd 

-path 

This is how my shell script looks like:

NOTE 

The -license flag need to point to the folder that contains the license file. The -config flag need to point to a config file. To make sure it works (if you have a space in your path to any of the files), you need to encapsulate the total statement with quotes. 

2... 

Open up the Terminal app and run the command:

3... 

Now rename your text file to something like modo.shell, make sure you use the "*.shell" extension 

4... 

RMB on the "*.shell" file and make sure you always open the file with the Terminal app 5... Done, you can now double click on the ".shell" file and modo will launch.

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1... 

Open the Get Info window for the modo.app 

2... 

Click on the miniature icon in the top left and press "Command C" (copy) 

3... 

Go to the "*.shell" file and open the Get Info window 

4... 

Click on the mini-icon and press "Command V" (paste) 

5... 

Done, to delete the customized icon, just select the thumbnail in the top left corner of the Get info window and press delete 

(To get a nice looking name, you can now delete the .shell extension)

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Conclusion 

NOTE 

 I'm aware of that I only scratched the surface on how to create all the configs. But there are a other tutorials out there that will cover those part. In this tutorial i wanted to straight out some questions on the mac side of things. As well as describing the concept in depth. 

You now have everything you need to run modo of an USB-disk, to move to another system or quickly reset a failing computer. You don't need to be afraid of messing up your user configs and modo will also run smoother with clean and fresh configs at every startup. The last thing to note if you're on osX, you'll now also be able to run several instances of modo. Just run the shell script again for a new instance of modo. 

RELATED 

http://content.luxology.com/community/user_tutorials/AndyBrown/My_UI.mov - a video tutorial on how to create custom viewports. 

http://forums.luxology.com/discussion/topic.aspx?id=13924 - a video tutorial on how to setup modo, a bit different, but still good.

http://www.vertexmonkey.com/help_proConfigSetup.php - a written tutorial similar to the above video tutorial.

http://content.luxology.com/modo/201/video/InEd.mov - a video tutorial on the input editor, remap keys.

http://content.luxology.com/community/user_tutorials/AndyBrown/Who_ate_all_the_pies.mov - a video tutorial on how to create menus.

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