So I installed a couple of utility kits in MODO yesterday that were put together by the talented Cristobal Villa and I could not be happier. I installed 'Model Colors', 'Quick Locators' and 'Super Aligners'. I'm typically pretty careful about what I add to MODO but these are no brainers. I use the Quick Locator pop-up in the tutorial below. I do think that MODO's customization usability has started to suffer under it's own weight. It's an extremely customizable and flexible program, but all that has come at a cost in usability IMO. I used to customize MODO all the time, in fact a number of my original MODO 101/201 customizations are part of the shipping product (things like the slash-n-burn workflow, the ctrl-1, ctrl-2 and ctrl-3 toggles, alt-1,2,3 for converting selections)...they've evolved over time but I think some of the configs still have my initials in them. Now however I tend to not customize MODO much, it's actually gotten more difficult and convoluted from the first versions IMO and it's difficult to do what you want without spending an entire day or two reacquainting yourself with the system (editing or creating xml files isn't very user friendly...or documented for that matter). What's the saying? 'With great power comes //great responsibility// greater UI complexity.' With that being said here's a link to Cristobal's fantastic MODO tools page (LINK)
I'm going to break the River Ecosystem tutorial up into a number of videos to make it easier to bear. I think these will be a good overview of MODO's deformation system as well as the Particle Modifiers once they're all up. Effectors, Mesh Sources, Falloffs and Influences all play a part in MODO's deformation system and once you get a handle on how it works things start to fall in place.
Part 2a of the River Ecosystem Tutorial, covering the basic terrain.