Marmoset vs Game Engine pros/cons?
polycounter lvl 7
With game engines like Unreal 4 now using PBR, I was wondering what the pros and cons of Marmoset would be. I understand that Marmoset is great for showcasing portfolio pieces, but with Unreal 4 available now, is really necessary to use a program like that versus just capturing your individual assets in UE4? I have yet to dabble in Marmoset so I wanted to clear this up before I started getting my feet wet in it.
Replies
Quick and simple to load up a model and a set of textures, looks great pretty much out of the box.
The down sides, well, you have far greater control over lighting setup in Unreal, you have much more ability to tweak and finesse material setups in Unreal, you can create much more vast and expansive areas in Unreal.
Basically though, Marmoset Toolbag is a really easy to use and flexible model viewer that is great for quick preview of your textures while working on them, and high quality display/renders for portfolios etc.
It is true that you can set up more complex scenes in UE4, as it is a full on game engine, however its also more time consuming and complex to import and set up materials, textures, re-import textures as you're working on them, etc.
On the other hand TB2 has fast auto re-loading of textures, which makes it ideal to use while authoring content. TB can also be set up to match UE4's base shaders quite accurately (will be more accurate with GGX in the next release) so there's nothing stopping you from using both. A lot of people that I've talked to do just that, use Toolbag 2 as a quick previewer while working on art content, and then send the final content off to the game engine.
Toolbag is no more complicated than it needs to be as a model viewer. That's one of my favorite things about it compared to using a full game engine for the same job. I would only use a more complex tool if I needed the complexity.