I'm getting some bad edges when using alpha (32-bit .tga):
I used a simple gradient (0-255) on two planes to test, does the viewer only do 1-bit alpha?
alpha threshold adjusts alphatest, you can change the blend mode to get 8bit alpha, but it is a lot less reliable and you will have sorting issues(as with most game engines)
i get some strange results after importing a duplicated Model. I tryed several ways but I don't find the error.
It seams like the error only in the bodygeo, face hair and other parts looka fine.
Obj Export from Maya 2009
IF I import the Mesh alone everything went fine. The problem only occurs after duplicting the mesh and import 3 of them. I check all necessary steps, mesh looks clean so far, no history, changed Obj export options from Maya from everything to nothing.
IF you need more information ask anytime.
Edit:
yeah i gured out it is only the bodymesh, maybe some vertexerrors? but I don' t have the knowleage to solve this problem.
Do you have any OBJ optimize options checked on? If so, turn those off and export again.
Also if that is the problem I've got a feeling like your scale is off of what Marmoset likes to work with. Go to the render tab in Marmoset and toggle the box labeled "show scale reference" on. Now you should see a human figure which is about the right size you want to be importing your objects into Marmoset.
edit: The uv for the right eye shell (below) was mirrored which was causing problems with the alphatest (blurred out both eyes).
So I unmirrored the uv for the right eyeshell, then duplicated and flipped the original texture (1 texture for each).
Works now:
Ok I guess I have to ask a noob question, sorry if this has been asked before.
Im working in marm for the first time and I want to change my resolution but I dont seem to even have the file it says to open to do that, and I dont seem to have the correct program to open .cfg files. If someone could help me out with that, it would help me a lot.
On top of that I'm having smoothing group issues when I export out of max, but I went back to check and see if my uv's were welded at all and they werent, I have also tried exporting an obj with none of the optimize boxes checked but this didnt fix the problem, some areas even appear to not have smoothing at all. Also you see how dark the lantern part of the model is, well that seems to be caused by the normals also because its not in the diffuse. None of these issues are showing in max of course like everyone else.
If you think this is caused by the welded uv's issue then can you please explain what to look for in more detail because I'm missing something, from what I can tell nothing is welded that shouldn't be.
open .cfg files in notepad(as stated in the readme/tutorial thing), invert your green channel in the normals to fix the seam, make sure mesh normals are being exported from max.
Its hard to tell exactly what you mean by "no smoothing" it doesnt really look like the uv welding error. This is obvious and will result in totally flat lighting, what you have doesnt appear to be completely flat, but it might help to see a larger image.
Oh ok sorry I guess I got confused when it told me windows didnt have the program I thought that it would just open in notepad automaticly /dumb
Well when I said no smoothing I mean that it looks like that area doesnt have any smoothing groups, at least thats what it looks like in max when something doesnt have smoothing groups, because you can see the facets.
I have inverted the green channel and thats what you see here, but there was a seam before and thats why I flipped it, so its the same problem inverted or not.
I made sure that normals, smoothing groups, and texture coordinates were checked on but under optimize they arent. But even when they were checked on I had the same problems
I'll try to upload a bigger picture it looks like photobucket is resizing my image..:/
As far as the inverting channel thing, can you post images of both? From that shot it really looks like it needs to be inverted. Surely one way or the other will look obviously better tho.
Max's tangents aren't going to match up exactly with marmoset, but you should be getting better results than what you have now.
this may have already been asked and or answered but has anyone tried to run Marmoset on a mac using VMware or parallels? I dont know if not wanting to sift through 45 pages of information is being lazy, but if so color me lazy. Thanks
We got my version of 2009 and his version of 2008 installed onto one machine, and I put the plug-in into the 2008 bin / plug-in directory. Trying loading the plug-in and it gives me that error.
Getting Your Turn Table Animation Into The Toolbag
Plug-ins for exporting out of Maya (and only Maya) are available in toolbag/exporter
stoogeExport_maya70.mll is for Maya 7
stoogeExport_maya80.mll is for Maya 8
stoogeExport_maya90.mll is for Maya 2008
You MUST use the 32-bit software, 64-bit will not work with the exporter. Currently these are the only three plug-ins available for Maya, so you must get a hold of an older version of Maya.
Copy the proper .mll file to into MAYA_LOCATION/bin/plug-ins/ where MAYA_LOCATION is the location of your Maya folder.
Copy stooge.mel into your ~/My Documents/maya/scripts/ on your computer.
-In Maya, combine meshes and rename them into what will be the chunks for each mat in marmoset (e.g. body, head, eyes, weapon)
-Add a single bone running vertically through the object where you want the rotation to be (usually the centre i guess!).
-Smooth bind (NOT rigid bind) the meshes to the bone. For me, binding all at once seemed to produce the same result as doing each piece individually, but as some have had issues, go with a chunk at a time. Note that rigid binding crashed maya on (failed) export! Smooth bind only!
-Make sure the influence of your mesh is set 100% to the bone if you hadn't already done so initially
-Animate the bone. For me, marnoset only seems to like a single keyframe tween- e.g. a keyframe at 1 and another at 24. When I added intervening keyframes, it would only export the animation up to the first keyframe it encountered. There may be a setting I'm missing but this is fine for turntable so I'm not desperately worried right now. When I want a wlk cycle things may change! You may need to adjust the animation tangent for a smooth animation. I dunno. Sometimes I do, others not.
-Call stooge gui in the MEL command line by typing "stooge" (without quotes). It is not necessary to select your object if you only have the one in your scene. Haven't tested with multiple objects. Select the following:
Write Tangents / Bitangents
Write Rig File
Write Bone Weights and Skeleton
Click Export and you will be prompted where to save. Name it whatever and save. Stooge will close.
-Type in "stooge" again this time select "Export only Animation." For some reason, I got a crash if the anim file had the same name as the skel and rig and mesh files so choose a new name.
-Put all the files, plus texture tga files in the toolbag folder as per the marmoset instructions.
-Open marmoset and load mesh, then find or open skeleton, then load animation. Then add textures one by one, clicking the "vertex skinning" box.
***If you do not click "VERTEX SKINNING" in the materials tab your object will not animate.***
-Done! Muck about with other settings as much as you like!
So, I've messed around with the toolbag and almost got everything looking perfect. However, is there any way to get rid of the side bars and menus when you take a screenshot? I'm using F12 to take the screenshot, but am only able to fit it in the tiny middle square. I was hoping you could disable the ui, since it is still included in the screen shot.
Thanks!
Edit* Nevermind, found in the controls file that space disables that. Awesome tools guys! Thanks a bunch!
thanks for the quick lowdown and helpful ticks on importing animation. Should save me a TON of time. thanks guys.:)
*****
I searched the threads high and low, but I couldn't find any information regarding the Light direction. While any animations play, I would love it if the Lights would stay in ONE spot and NOT rotate too, causing my mesh and animations to rotate around in darkness and light.
Anybody have any leads to this?
Awesome application. Did most of my portfolio work using this baby. Thanks to everyone, especially to EarthQuake for the useful advice on how to get around this Toolbag
Hey guys. Been following this thread and trying to find out what the problem I'm having is, and two people have had it, but no one seems to have been able to answer them.
It's to do with the "striping" issue.
Here's what I have right now.
Now the issue is this:
-The model right now is using a 2048x2048 24bit tga diffuse texture.
-It works if it's 1k 24/32bit.
-It works if its 2k, but only 8 bit.
Same applies to normal and specular maps. I tested this on my friends PC and it worked fine, and I even tested it on my mums pc, and hers doesnt have a GPU! And it worked.
Now if I'm working on a project, and I need it to use the 2k texture with an alpha, I am screwed I'm sure there's a solution to this problem, and was hoping one of you guys might be able to suggest things. The only thing I can add that was similar to what those other guys were having is that my GPU is a Radeon all in wonder 1800.
That's all I guess. It's the only downside I'm having to this otherwise awesome renderer
I'm having a problem with the shadows and it occurs depending of how I move the skylight or where the light position is:
I thought it could be a problem with my textures but it isn't since I've tested one of the models of the first post and the problem keeps persisting. I'm using the standard configuration, didn't change any setting. Now if I uncheck the shadows in the render tab it works fine but well without shadows...
Any ideas? Are there any know problems related to ATI graphic cards?
I would love it if the Lights would stay in ONE spot and NOT rotate too, causing my mesh and animations to rotate around in darkness and light.
Anybody have any leads to this?
Your light rotates because you're using SHIFT + Right Click. That causes your light to circle your object. To move your light without causing it to circle your object, use SHIFT + Left Click to move the light.
One way I found to accomplish this is to turn off post effects (or maybe just bloom) under the render tab also without displaying the sky box.
Then take your screenshot, F12.
Then you can just use the magic wand tool in PS with anti-alias checked off and a tolerance of 0 to select out the background.
You can also change the background color to something else if your model has a lot of black on it and it interferes with the selection.
Another way would be to texture you model with pure white texture using the FlatEnvironment channel model under the material tab to create a alpha like screenshot.
one thing you could do would be turn off the skybox, make sure the BG is black, and use the flat lighting model, and just apply a white diffuse texture to your model, then you sort of get an alpha channel
hey Marmo guys. I just finished this off and thanks to marmoset it looks great! I had quite a lot of messing around, and getting a spinny out has been a pain, even though I worked it out with no help, its possible, just fiddly! Also would be great to have some camera animation so I could just get some nice flyby for my reel, oh well... nice engine tho!
i'm having some issues with shading errors on my latest model, hopefully someone can shed some light....
I've got 3 pieces of geometry with one normal map, inside maya everything looks fine, but when i import as an obj i'm getting some errors (circled in red)
Everything is one smoothing group prior to the bake
A. You've got a really really excessive amount of un-needed geometry, you should post the full mesh in pimping for crits
b. These are triangulation issues. A couple ideas to fix
1. Triangulate your mesh before baking your normals in maya
2. "Freeze normals" and use the stooge exporter that came with toolbag instead of using OBJ(as long as you're running as supported version of maya, check the readme/tutorial thing)
It looks kind of like the triangulation of the model is fighting with the normal map.
Is the OBJ export triangulating your model? If so it might be turning those edges the "wrong" way, in other words the opposite direction of what the normal map was baked at.
Even if OBJ isn't triangulating your model, Marmoset might be interpreting those hidden edges the wrong way, if that's the case you need to manually triangulate those problem areas to match up with your normal map.
Hope that helps.
EDIT:
LOL at the flurry of responses before I could even type mine out.
actually, just a note here, in BOTH cases i think you should freeze normals. As rendering from a non-triangulated mesh, and then triangulating will affect the mesh normals(a small but perhaps noticable bit)
yeah i hear you on that one, i just didnt feel like waiting 20 minutes for another bake to finish to see if it would work. Will def. be triangulating then baking and not the other way around. Thanks again
freezing normals should enable you to not have to worry about it either way, but i do not know how well OBJ saves mesh normals. I just know before i export with stooge i freeze normals(will actually be an automatic function in the exporter.... someday).
to clarify, the only thing i have to do to freeze normals is Modify---FreezeTransformations---Check "Normals" box and go rite?
It seems to actually be giving me worse results now.....
Also, i'm curious as to why this is happening in the first place, Just luck of the draw? i've imported many models into marm. Without ever having to triangulate prior to baking or do anything special and they all work just fine. Is it just a matter of poor geometry, too many triangles?
I don't wanna to be annoying here but you guys really don't know why my renders look so weird when shadows are on? Has anyone had this problem? This is making me mad! lol
ATI is known to have some issues with shadow filtering
It looks like your model may be really really big? Turn on the scale reference and see how that looks. Having a mesh that is too large will result in some wierd lighting and shadow problems.
after I reduced a lot the size of the mesh the problem is almost gone (although the original size of the mesh compared to the scale reference was correct).
There are still some weird shadows on the model but those are probably related to my ati card, that is nowadays a bit old. I also saw some people complaining about ati cards, guess I'll have to switch back to a nvidia card again...
Yeah i've tried marmo on a 5770 and had noticable shadow problems, which were also apparent in some games i played too, so likely not a marmo problem or something you're doing wrong but an ATI problem.
From what i understand Nvidia does nice soft blending with shadowmaps and ATI well.... Doesnt! They do some nasty pixelated mess, i dont know why.
I've got a new problem where any items using the skin shader are super-bright suddenly.
Also, my specular sensitivity is through the roof. I've gotta knock it down to almost zero to get anything but 100%. I recently updated to the latest Nvidia drivers, so I'm guessing that is the issue...
Replies
alpha threshold adjusts alphatest, you can change the blend mode to get 8bit alpha, but it is a lot less reliable and you will have sorting issues(as with most game engines)
i get some strange results after importing a duplicated Model. I tryed several ways but I don't find the error.
It seams like the error only in the bodygeo, face hair and other parts looka fine.
Obj Export from Maya 2009
IF I import the Mesh alone everything went fine. The problem only occurs after duplicting the mesh and import 3 of them. I check all necessary steps, mesh looks clean so far, no history, changed Obj export options from Maya from everything to nothing.
IF you need more information ask anytime.
Edit:
yeah i gured out it is only the bodymesh, maybe some vertexerrors? but I don' t have the knowleage to solve this problem.
Hope you can help me out
Also if that is the problem I've got a feeling like your scale is off of what Marmoset likes to work with. Go to the render tab in Marmoset and toggle the box labeled "show scale reference" on. Now you should see a human figure which is about the right size you want to be importing your objects into Marmoset.
edit: The uv for the right eye shell (below) was mirrored which was causing problems with the alphatest (blurred out both eyes).
So I unmirrored the uv for the right eyeshell, then duplicated and flipped the original texture (1 texture for each).
Works now:
Im working in marm for the first time and I want to change my resolution but I dont seem to even have the file it says to open to do that, and I dont seem to have the correct program to open .cfg files. If someone could help me out with that, it would help me a lot.
On top of that I'm having smoothing group issues when I export out of max, but I went back to check and see if my uv's were welded at all and they werent, I have also tried exporting an obj with none of the optimize boxes checked but this didnt fix the problem, some areas even appear to not have smoothing at all. Also you see how dark the lantern part of the model is, well that seems to be caused by the normals also because its not in the diffuse. None of these issues are showing in max of course like everyone else.
If you think this is caused by the welded uv's issue then can you please explain what to look for in more detail because I'm missing something, from what I can tell nothing is welded that shouldn't be.
Its hard to tell exactly what you mean by "no smoothing" it doesnt really look like the uv welding error. This is obvious and will result in totally flat lighting, what you have doesnt appear to be completely flat, but it might help to see a larger image.
Well when I said no smoothing I mean that it looks like that area doesnt have any smoothing groups, at least thats what it looks like in max when something doesnt have smoothing groups, because you can see the facets.
I have inverted the green channel and thats what you see here, but there was a seam before and thats why I flipped it, so its the same problem inverted or not.
I made sure that normals, smoothing groups, and texture coordinates were checked on but under optimize they arent. But even when they were checked on I had the same problems
I'll try to upload a bigger picture it looks like photobucket is resizing my image..:/
^^^should be fixed now
As far as the inverting channel thing, can you post images of both? From that shot it really looks like it needs to be inverted. Surely one way or the other will look obviously better tho.
Max's tangents aren't going to match up exactly with marmoset, but you should be getting better results than what you have now.
Do I still need to get my hands on Maya 2008 for the 9.0 exporter or has there been a 10.0 exporter released for Maya 2009?
Wanna bring in some stuff and have them do a simple turn table.
Thanks!
I get an error in the command line saying
// Error: //
// Error: (stoogeExport_maya90) //
// Error: Unable to dynamically load : C:/Program Files/Autodesk/Maya2008/bin/plug-ins/stoogeExport_maya90.mll
We got my version of 2009 and his version of 2008 installed onto one machine, and I put the plug-in into the 2008 bin / plug-in directory. Trying loading the plug-in and it gives me that error.
An earlier post here had this problem but they were using 2009.
Ideas? We're using the 64-bit of 2008 if that matters.
Glad there's an answer, thanks
Getting Your Turn Table Animation Into The Toolbag
Plug-ins for exporting out of Maya (and only Maya) are available in toolbag/exporter
stoogeExport_maya70.mll is for Maya 7
stoogeExport_maya80.mll is for Maya 8
stoogeExport_maya90.mll is for Maya 2008
You MUST use the 32-bit software, 64-bit will not work with the exporter. Currently these are the only three plug-ins available for Maya, so you must get a hold of an older version of Maya.
Copy the proper .mll file to into MAYA_LOCATION/bin/plug-ins/ where MAYA_LOCATION is the location of your Maya folder.
Copy stooge.mel into your ~/My Documents/maya/scripts/ on your computer.
-In Maya, combine meshes and rename them into what will be the chunks for each mat in marmoset (e.g. body, head, eyes, weapon)
-Add a single bone running vertically through the object where you want the rotation to be (usually the centre i guess!).
-Smooth bind (NOT rigid bind) the meshes to the bone. For me, binding all at once seemed to produce the same result as doing each piece individually, but as some have had issues, go with a chunk at a time. Note that rigid binding crashed maya on (failed) export! Smooth bind only!
-Make sure the influence of your mesh is set 100% to the bone if you hadn't already done so initially
-Animate the bone. For me, marnoset only seems to like a single keyframe tween- e.g. a keyframe at 1 and another at 24. When I added intervening keyframes, it would only export the animation up to the first keyframe it encountered. There may be a setting I'm missing but this is fine for turntable so I'm not desperately worried right now. When I want a wlk cycle things may change! You may need to adjust the animation tangent for a smooth animation. I dunno. Sometimes I do, others not.
-Call stooge gui in the MEL command line by typing "stooge" (without quotes). It is not necessary to select your object if you only have the one in your scene. Haven't tested with multiple objects. Select the following:
Write Tangents / Bitangents
Write Rig File
Write Bone Weights and Skeleton
Click Export and you will be prompted where to save. Name it whatever and save. Stooge will close.
-Type in "stooge" again this time select "Export only Animation." For some reason, I got a crash if the anim file had the same name as the skel and rig and mesh files so choose a new name.
-Put all the files, plus texture tga files in the toolbag folder as per the marmoset instructions.
-Open marmoset and load mesh, then find or open skeleton, then load animation. Then add textures one by one, clicking the "vertex skinning" box.
***If you do not click "VERTEX SKINNING" in the materials tab your object will not animate.***
-Done! Muck about with other settings as much as you like!
Hope this helps others.
Thanks!
Edit* Nevermind, found in the controls file that space disables that. Awesome tools guys! Thanks a bunch!
*****
I searched the threads high and low, but I couldn't find any information regarding the Light direction. While any animations play, I would love it if the Lights would stay in ONE spot and NOT rotate too, causing my mesh and animations to rotate around in darkness and light.
Anybody have any leads to this?
Here is a turntable of a bronze celt:
[ame]
It's to do with the "striping" issue.
Here's what I have right now.
Now the issue is this:
-The model right now is using a 2048x2048 24bit tga diffuse texture.
-It works if it's 1k 24/32bit.
-It works if its 2k, but only 8 bit.
Same applies to normal and specular maps. I tested this on my friends PC and it worked fine, and I even tested it on my mums pc, and hers doesnt have a GPU! And it worked.
Now if I'm working on a project, and I need it to use the 2k texture with an alpha, I am screwed
That's all I guess. It's the only downside I'm having to this otherwise awesome renderer
I'm having a problem with the shadows and it occurs depending of how I move the skylight or where the light position is:
I thought it could be a problem with my textures but it isn't since I've tested one of the models of the first post and the problem keeps persisting. I'm using the standard configuration, didn't change any setting. Now if I uncheck the shadows in the render tab it works fine but well without shadows...
Any ideas? Are there any know problems related to ATI graphic cards?
Thanks in advance!
Your light rotates because you're using SHIFT + Right Click. That causes your light to circle your object. To move your light without causing it to circle your object, use SHIFT + Left Click to move the light.
turntable movie
[ame]
Turntable movie
[ame]
Turntable movie
[ame]
One way I found to accomplish this is to turn off post effects (or maybe just bloom) under the render tab also without displaying the sky box.
Then take your screenshot, F12.
Then you can just use the magic wand tool in PS with anti-alias checked off and a tolerance of 0 to select out the background.
You can also change the background color to something else if your model has a lot of black on it and it interferes with the selection.
Another way would be to texture you model with pure white texture using the FlatEnvironment channel model under the material tab to create a alpha like screenshot.
Here is my Some work I've done using the toolbag.
By bigern77 at 2010-03-23
I've got 3 pieces of geometry with one normal map, inside maya everything looks fine, but when i import as an obj i'm getting some errors (circled in red)
Everything is one smoothing group prior to the bake
b. These are triangulation issues. A couple ideas to fix
1. Triangulate your mesh before baking your normals in maya
2. "Freeze normals" and use the stooge exporter that came with toolbag instead of using OBJ(as long as you're running as supported version of maya, check the readme/tutorial thing)
Is the OBJ export triangulating your model? If so it might be turning those edges the "wrong" way, in other words the opposite direction of what the normal map was baked at.
Even if OBJ isn't triangulating your model, Marmoset might be interpreting those hidden edges the wrong way, if that's the case you need to manually triangulate those problem areas to match up with your normal map.
Hope that helps.
EDIT:
LOL at the flurry of responses before I could even type mine out.
Edit: god damn i'm tired, didnt realize how stupid that second question was
It seems to actually be giving me worse results now.....
Also, i'm curious as to why this is happening in the first place, Just luck of the draw? i've imported many models into marm. Without ever having to triangulate prior to baking or do anything special and they all work just fine. Is it just a matter of poor geometry, too many triangles?
luck of the draw pretty much, its basically how marmoset decides to triangulate your mesh on import vrs how maya decides to.
not freeze
PS: Lovely works from wdcstudios, BigErn and rahul_shrimali!
It looks like your model may be really really big? Turn on the scale reference and see how that looks. Having a mesh that is too large will result in some wierd lighting and shadow problems.
Try tweaking the shadow distance slider as well.
after I reduced a lot the size of the mesh the problem is almost gone (although the original size of the mesh compared to the scale reference was correct).
There are still some weird shadows on the model but those are probably related to my ati card, that is nowadays a bit old. I also saw some people complaining about ati cards, guess I'll have to switch back to a nvidia card again...
Anyway thanks for the tip!
From what i understand Nvidia does nice soft blending with shadowmaps and ATI well.... Doesnt! They do some nasty pixelated mess, i dont know why.
Also, my specular sensitivity is through the roof. I've gotta knock it down to almost zero to get anything but 100%. I recently updated to the latest Nvidia drivers, so I'm guessing that is the issue...