What's the purpose of Marmoset
polycounter
I heard about Marmoset throughout years and even once installed trial long ago.
I had a question that time and still have it now. Why may I need it for?
From what I remember it's a kind of real time render.
Not matching to what I have ever been doing in a game to be a good reference. Not a baker.
So I wonder what people do with it? What's the purpose? Is it possible to bring material tweaks or something back to a game?
Am I missing something cool and important?
I had a question that time and still have it now. Why may I need it for?
From what I remember it's a kind of real time render.
Not matching to what I have ever been doing in a game to be a good reference. Not a baker.
So I wonder what people do with it? What's the purpose? Is it possible to bring material tweaks or something back to a game?
Am I missing something cool and important?
Replies
Why not just render it in Mental ray or maybe Octane? Does it have some advantages?
Why use Toolbag rather than your game engine? It's simple really, speed and quality. The workflow is designed around getting a model in and looking good with the minimum of fuss, perfect if you want a light weight app for previewing your materials or if you're putting together renders for your portfolio. Toolbag is not a full on game engine, which frees us up to focus entirely on image quality without the same performance concerns you would traditionally have.
Why use Toolbag rather than an offline renderer? Rendering speed and workflow speed. Images are rendered in realtime, multi-sampled high resolution renders can be saved out in a matter of seconds rather than minutes or hours. Again, the focused workflow that Toolbag provides means you can get your model in and looking good with much less time spent setting up lighting, fiddling with rendering settings, doing test renders, etc.
Ever since we started development on Toolbag 2, I've basically stopped using Modo's render, and I love Modo's renderer! I just don't have the patience to sit and wait a half hour to see how my materials look.
We've heard from a lot of folks outside the games industry (film, product vis, arch vis, etc) that use Toolbag 2 for all sorts of purposes as well, especially look dev/pre vis.
Here's something I've been working on (WIP highpoly):
With 2.07 we've included Marmoset Viewer at no extra cost, which allows you to export a high quality package that can be viewed real-time, in your browser and a huge range of devices.
To keep it balanced, as Obscura mentions, currently Toolbag doesn't handle large and complex scenes very well (lack of radiosity is a big reason), and currently we do not support animation. We're working on both of those though, and will likely add them in a future version.
Currently, there is no way to export material changes in Toolbag to your engine, however material export to UE4 and/or Unity is something we may consider in the future.
If you want to see how Toolbag fits into your pipeline, we offer a free 30 day trial: http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag. If the trial you used was Toolbag 1, you should definately give Toolbag 2 a try. TB2 was re-written completely and doesn't resemble TB1 so much. Over the last two or so years we've added a ton of functionality as well.
Any more questions, let me know.
stunning wip your working on my friend.
@gnoop,
you'll dig it.
Still I have a few questions. I am looking for a solution to see and tweak textures real time with ability to bake the tweaks back into the textures or just see immediate result of psd file editing.
Problem is that I can't find a soft with preview close enough to our game. U4 is too good for example or maybe I just have no idea how to simplify its renderer and tone mapper.
I have been using Blender GLSL viewport + nodes for that purpose for years but it's missing some features now. With Max ShaderFX I can't recreate lighting close enough and understand it not well enough. Substance painter also not that much tweakable.
I wonder if Marmoset could be helpful for such task or it's just unrealistic expectation and no 3d party soft would be able to recreate lighting/shader appearance of a random game.
Generally this is two part. First off, is matching the shader model and texture inputs that your engine uses.
Do you use gloss or roughness? If roughness where black = most glossy and white = most rough, hit the invert check in the gloss map box.
Do you use specular or metalness? If metalness, swap the reflectivity module to metalness. If metalness with secondary specular input (for insulators), use advanced metalness.
Do you use blinn-phong or GGX specular? If GXX, swap the reflection module to GGX. If you use a different specular model, let us know what it is and we may consider supporting it.
To match up your lighting, start by using the same image-based lighting content that your engine uses for ambient diffuse/spec, in my experience the IBL content accounts for the majority of differences when comparing different apps/engines with standard PBR pipelines. You can load custom HDR panos in the Sky object properties. To get an even closer match, bake a local HDR probe, save it out and load that into Toolbag. Most file formats and cubemap layouts are supported and auto-detected on load, so this is a really easy process.
Our dynamic lights probably work a little differently in than in your engine, but that shouldn't be enough to make a significant difference.
That should cover most of it, unless you use uncommon shader models or something, or if you're using a custom gloss curve. For reference, GGX gloss curve is calibrated to match UE4 as closely as possible. Again, any information you have on that stuff would be interesting to know.
Thanks for probe advise . I need to try it.
I think the filmic tone mapper is a closer match to UE4's tone mapping, you can change that from linear to filmic in the camera settings.
This is what I was able to get in UE4 using the same IBL and turning off some of the post effects:
We may have gotten a little closer with the gloss curve from that shoot too, I don't remember exactly.
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