Friday, June 8th, 2018 Posted by Jim Thacker

Mechanical Color’s Dara tools for Modo go open-source


The popular Dara collection of utility plugins for Modo has been made open-source.

Developed by Mechanical Color – aka industrial designer and tools developer Adam O’Hern – the professional edition of the product bundle originally sold for $399.

It comprises 13 individual Modo kits, ranging from popular UI element collection Zen to modelling tools, material and render-management utilities, and even a collection of base models of real-world vehicles.

A collection of utility tools with a cult following among Modo users
Originally released as separate plugins, the Dara tools built up a cult following among Modo users, but development slowed last year, with O’Hern handing over product support to fellow dev Yazan Malkosh.

Malkosh has now announced that the entire collection will be released under an open-source MIT licence, expressing the hope that as well as enabling more people to use the tools, the move will encourage Foundry to incorporate some of the features into Modo itself.

His full statement is reproduced in this thread on Foundry’s forum.

Availability and system requirements
The Dara plugins can be downloaded from Mechanical Color’s Gumroad store. It still shows the commercial pricing, but if you select the non-commercial editions, you can download the files for free.

We haven’t tested, but according to the thread on Foundry’s forums, the tools should work with Modo 9xx up.

Source code for the plugins is available from 9b Studios’ GitHub repository under an MIT licence.


Download the Dara plugins for Modo from Mechanical Color’s Gumroad store

Download the source code for the Dara plugins from GitHub