Most useful:
Visualizing my models quickly with nice IBL.
Workflow Overhaul:
- Light placement. I'd love a split view, or a picture-in-picture. In fact, a separate window which showed the last viewed camera angle while the main window was usable for light placement would be great. You could then exit light placement mode and return to the original angle.
- Gloss map file field. Gloss in the spec alpha is fine, but I think that should be enabled via a checkbox that overrides a separate, dedicated gloss map field.
New Features:
- I would love to be able to set the tangent space to match something else (like 3dsmax, for instance). I'm having all sorts of mirror seams, wierd normals only on mirrored faces, etc. which are preventing me from using marmoset on my latest project.
- Light setup saving would be awesome
- My dream feature is a node-based material editor!
Least liked:
- Tangent space issues
Thanks for all your hard work guys, Toolbag is an awesome tool and I can't wait to see what you do with it!
Marmoset is great realtime preview I really in love with it.
Just few things you might be see as minor
-Undo - after get a nice setting, light position, post effect value, sky intensity etc, unless we save the scene, if we do some changes and not happy with that, it will be so great if we can revert with undo
-obj update -Eventually working with unfinish model which I mean just testing some material and texture applied on model, after modified the model and updated OBJ marmoset reset all with default, spesific shader set gone and need to recall and reapply, at least marmoset can recognize obj naming so obj will update with material still applied there
-Cheers
This is not a request for a feature and I'm not sure if someone has mentioned it but when you set up lights and then save the scene, after the first save, the spotlight angle will not save from that point forward. Other adjustments such as light position and intensity will save but not spotlight angle. Seems like a fairly easy bug to fix so just thought I'd mention it here.
@: NEKOTIQ the tga captures I get out of it have an alpha channel with the background transparent. not sure about video though.
My biggest issue is that the point lights dont seem to effect surfaces that are behind another using blend modes.
for example if the eyes are using a wet layer set to add blend mode. than the eye geometry wont catch any lighting from the point lights and will be darker than the rest of the mesh. it works using the environment lighting though
@: NEKOTIQ the tga captures I get out of it have an alpha channel with the background transparent. not sure about video though.
My biggest issue is that the point lights dont seem to effect surfaces that are behind another using blend modes.
for example if the eyes are using a wet layer set to add blend mode. than the eye geometry wont catch any lighting from the point lights and will be darker than the rest of the mesh. it works using the environment lighting though
Yes, alpha should be saved if you're exporting your screenshots with a format like TGA that supports alpha. Also if you're exporting a series of still images for a 3d spin to compile into a video, alpha should be saved as well.
I'm not sure about direct video export, I'm not sure which video codecs even support alpha channels? If anyone has a suggestion or more information on that, that would be great.
Dylan: The point lights thing, yeah there are some general bugs right now with dynamic lights and blend modes. I'm not sure if this will help, but try turning off shadow casting on your wet layer.
The alpha doesn't always pick up all the chunks, though (I can't remember how I reproduced it though - I think it was saving alpha for only the chunk with a custom material, not the default - or vice versa)
This is not a request for a feature and I'm not sure if someone has mentioned it but when you set up lights and then save the scene, after the first save, the spotlight angle will not save from that point forward. Other adjustments such as light position and intensity will save but not spotlight angle. Seems like a fairly easy bug to fix so just thought I'd mention it here.
thanks!
Thanks, I verified this and got it into our bug system here, should be fixed in a future release, not sure if it will get into the next patch though.
So I'm assuming this for all for version 1.09? I just got 1.08 and the site is down.
No, sorry for the confusion, 1.08 (and 1.09) are minor patch releases.
We're collecting feedback for the next major release. We've got a lot of exciting new stuff that we want to add, but its going to take us some time to pull it all off.
We still plan on releasing bug fixes and things like that for V1, but we've really outgrown a lot of the back-end stuff with the current version, the UI and the basic scene structure are outdated so we're focused on a core-rewrite of a lot of our systems that will aid is in future development. This will also give us the ability to get on some other systems, like OSX for instance, that we weren't able to do previously due to reliance on some windows specific bits of code.
You can expect to see some major changes from us in the not so distant future.
We had some technical issues with the site, it should be back up soon!
No, sorry for the confusion, 1.08 (and 1.09) are minor patch releases.
We're collecting feedback for the next major release. We've got a lot of exciting new stuff that we want to add, but its going to take us some time to pull it all off.
We still plan on releasing bug fixes and things like that for V1, but we've really outgrown a lot of the back-end stuff with the current version, the UI and the basic scene structure are outdated so we're focused on a core-rewrite of a lot of our systems that will aid is in future development. This will also give us the ability to get on some other systems, like OSX for instance, that we weren't able to do previously due to reliance on some windows specific bits of code.
You can expect to see some major changes from us in the not so distant future.
We had some technical issues with the site, it should be back up soon!
I'm excited to see what the future holds for Marmoset.
Thanks for letting me know.
I'm messing around with Marmoset right now, and I'm noticing a couple of things I'd like to see with the Sky stuff.
First, I'd like to see support for more formats. The regular format you find online is .hdr, and Marmoset doesn't support that. I have to open the image in Photoshop, save out as a PBM, rename it in Windows to .BFM (they're the same, but Marmoset won't load the PBM that Photoshop names it by default). It would be nice to just load .HDR files directly.
Second, I can't seem to get the nice shadows that some of the default Skies have. It would be nice if there was some way to just do quick overall tweaks to a Sky, like say Saturation, or a Hue shift, or even a temperature shift. There's one I'd really like to use, but it's just a bit too warm. And I can't figure out how to just desaturate it a bit in Photoshop, as that seems to kill the shadows (for some reason) when I import it back through the Sky Tool.
I'm messing around with Marmoset right now, and I'm noticing a couple of things I'd like to see with the Sky stuff.
First, I'd like to see support for more formats. The regular format you find online is .hdr, and Marmoset doesn't support that. I have to open the image in Photoshop, save out as a PBM, rename it in Windows to .BFM (they're the same, but Marmoset won't load the PBM that Photoshop names it by default). It would be nice to just load .HDR files directly.
Second, I can't seem to get the nice shadows that some of the default Skies have. It would be nice if there was some way to just do quick overall tweaks to a Sky, like say Saturation, or a Hue shift, or even a temperature shift. There's one I'd really like to use, but it's just a bit too warm. And I can't figure out how to just desaturate it a bit in Photoshop, as that seems to kill the shadows (for some reason) when I import it back through the Sky Tool.
Edit:
Oh, also, Omni-light shadows.
Some more control over the existing sky presets(like color, saturation, contrast) is high on my list too.
If you have, can you post some images of your issues?(maybe in the toolbag questions thread). I'm not an expert with the sky tool, but I can check with our tools guys and see if they have any advice if you can give me some specific examples of what sort of result you're getting, and an explanation of what you'd like to achieve.
Yeah, I went through that tutorial last night. It's how I found about those other sites to download HDR panoramas from (which by the way are all in the .hdr format). Really, I just don't understand the part about the shadow image. I think that's the part that's throwing me off. It's kinda vague in the tutorial. Here's an example of a thing I'm working on:
On the left is the Pisa sky. On the right I took the image from \base\sky\pisa and ran it through the sky tool. The result seems quite unpredictable to me. This one is pretty indicative of how it is with the rest of the HDR images I'm using. On the left is how I would expect it, on the right is how it actually comes out. Usually much more washed out, with unclear shadows.
I think another useful thing would be to allow for custom meshes in the sky tool, instead of just those spheres. That way I could preview what it's actually going to look like.
Yeah, I went through that tutorial last night. It's how I found about those other sites to download HDR panoramas from (which by the way are all in the .hdr format). Really, I just don't understand the part about the shadow image. I think that's the part that's throwing me off. It's kinda vague in the tutorial. Here's an example of a thing I'm working on:
On the left is the Pisa sky. On the right I took the image from \base\sky\pisa and ran it through the sky tool. The result seems quite unpredictable to me. This one is pretty indicative of how it is with the rest of the HDR images I'm using. On the left is how I would expect it, on the right is how it actually comes out. Usually much more washed out, with unclear shadows.
I think another useful thing would be to allow for custom meshes in the sky tool, instead of just those spheres. That way I could preview what it's actually going to look like.
Ok so, its hard to tell you exactly why you're seeing different results here, but a few things:
A. the exposure for both of your examples are different, if you even that out you might get better results
B. If you're loading the .TGA file from the pisa sky, what you're doing is loading the 8-bit file meant for the skybox display, not an HDR source file(which is what you want to start with).
C. The shadow map is really just a copy of your cubemap, but with the bright light sources Photoshopped out.
Then I photoshoped out the brightest highlights for the "shadow" image, I just clone stamped them out, I don't think you have to be super accurate with it.
Also, when you save your PFM file out of photoshop, just type the extension there at the end of the file name, then you won't have to rename it.
would be cool:
- changing between perpective camera, and orthographic top-bottom, left-right, front-back views vithout loosing your camera placement would be really useful when messing around light placements (easy access from the ui maybe?)
- also split views would be really useful when placing stuff in 3d
- easier saving projects (without having to save my mesh and materials separately first model by model..) so e.g. when i save my scene, it saves ereything into it's folder that i see there
opening a new mesh clearing materials is also painful
- separate texture slots for every map! no alphas! coz it's ment to be easy and confortable way of presenting your work and tweaking stuff is a pain in the butt with saving glow and stuff into alpha channel (plus i don't use marmoset every day, so i forget where i have to use alpha anyways)
- support for more UV channels, at least 1 and 2 (would be a bonus to even be able to animate U and V panning /for animated textures/ on each channel by moving and/or rotating them plus mabye their visibility and being able to change how the tho channels are blended /multiply, add etc./)
+ tiling settings?
- turntable anims could be really laggy even with quite low settings, so it would be awsome to have an option for "pre-rendering" my turntable. meaning: marmoset could save my turntable video like a non-realtime render, to make sure my turnable vid won't be laggy at all. if it makes sense
- applying multimaterials based on imported mesh info (if the model i import to marmoset had multiple materials applied to different parts of the same mesh. it would be useful if marmoset could load that information somehow (like Material ID), right now the only way i can apply multiple /separate/ shaders onto a model is to detach each part i'd like to apply a different material to)
- FBX import with textures/shaders set up automatically *AGREED!!
+ also FBX-animation import
- being able to pose a fully rigged character with IK or a character with FK
thanks for all the love you give to the community
Marmoset is fun to use but at the same time i always hope with time you guys will get rid of every annoying things this software has
keep up the great work!
I am curious, this has been mentioned a few times but which file types would you guys like to see supported?
TIF. I export everything to Crytif since I use Cryengine most of the time and it's a paint to save out a separate copy for no reason except to look at it in Marmoset if I'm just texturing.
don't know if it's already been mentioned, but i'd like to see multiple tangent space calculators.
what i mean by this, is that you use a simple check-box to tell Marmoset whether your maps were baked in Max, Maya, or xNormal, and Marmoset uses the appropriate tangent calculation. it really shouldn't be that difficult to do, right? it's just swapping out a single line of math based on a boolean operation.
Which feature(s) of Marmoset Toolbag do you find the most useful?
Model viewing and lighting
Which feature(s) or function(s) of Marmoset Toolbag do you think would benefit from a workflow overhaul?
The material system. It's way too easy to get your materials dropped from your mesh by mistake. For example, reloading the mesh and you lose all your materials and you have to import them again.
Which new feature(s) would you like to see in Marmoset Toolbag?
I think the lighting system needs a bit more of work. I would like to see a) some more light types and b) the ability to snap lights to vertices. Using the manipulator to move lights around is too time-consuming.
I also strongly suggest you add reflectivity/cube map support. I recently tried importing a car into Marmoset and it's difficult to make it look good when specularity and reflectivity is the "same thing".
The third thing I would like to ask you about is to overlook some of the post effects. Ambient occlusion and DOF is quite buggy for me. I often get dark/grey mesh parts - which somehow has something to do with camera distance and angle. My stuff looks fine from some angles but completely fucked from others. It would also be nice to have a few sliders for the AO options - so that we can for example increase or lower the detail of the AO.
What do you like least about Marmoset Toolbag?
There's nothing I "dislike" in Marmoset but the lack of reflectivity map support is the biggest nuissance atm.
If you’ve used the Marmoset Toolbag trial but decided not to purchase, what were the main reasons for that choice?
I own a legal copy so don't worry about it I think the price is very fair and that people shouldn't complain.
I think the lighting system needs a bit more of work. I would like to see a) some more light types and b) the ability to snap lights to vertices. Using the manipulator to move lights around is too time-consuming.
Or at least enhance the current manipulator. The current one is a bit tiny to select and when the framerate goes down it's even harder (missed click and/or wrong click like click on rotation instead of translation). Also a way to translate on two axis at the same time would be really cool.
Maybe, I could ask this too : the possibility to setup a grid (like in maya) + a snap to move some objects on it ?
I have one thing in mind about Marmoset I would like to see : the freeze of the render when Marmoset lose the window focus.
I often switch between Marmoset and photoshop and sometimes I stay on photoshop for long minutes. Since Marmoset seems to only reload the texture when the windows get the focus back, I don't think it's necessary to keep the render updated (or maybe make this toggleable). I often minimize Mamroset in the taskbar just to stop the rendering, otherwise my GPU go crazy because the window is visible, even if I'm not working with it.
I'm going to pipe in as well, someone probably already mentioned this, but when importing a mesh (say I fixed a triangle or moved something slightly), don't discard all of the materials in the scene, and reapply them provided the asset name stays the same! It's extremely annoying to make a small tweak on a mesh and then have to reapply everything in the scene.
Other things I would like:
1. The ability to move meshes around in the scene, allowing us to compose different scenes with the same assets without having to reimport objects and reapply materials, etc
2. Renaming objects in the scene. I'm a lazy artist in Maya, I don't name until I export, and even then I'm still lazy and name it something dumb half of the time. When I bring it into Toolbag, I would like to be able to rename it then, so I will have "head" "body" "armor" etc, instead of "poly_cube1.obj" "poly_sphere3.obj" etc
Not really a feature request, but you guys should ask Yosuke Ishikawa to make some Toolbag tutorials for your website. That guy pushes your product's capabilities further than anyone else IMO.
I'm going to pipe in as well, someone probably already mentioned this, but when importing a mesh (say I fixed a triangle or moved something slightly), don't discard all of the materials in the scene, and reapply them provided the asset name stays the same! It's extremely annoying to make a small tweak on a mesh and then have to reapply everything in the scene.
Other things I would like:
1. The ability to move meshes around in the scene, allowing us to compose different scenes with the same assets without having to reimport objects and reapply materials, etc
2. Renaming objects in the scene. I'm a lazy artist in Maya, I don't name until I export, and even then I'm still lazy and name it something dumb half of the time. When I bring it into Toolbag, I would like to be able to rename it then, so I will have "head" "body" "armor" etc, instead of "poly_cube1.obj" "poly_sphere3.obj" etc
You'll be happy to know that pretty much everything you're asking for here is in our early build of Toolbag 2 now. We don't have the auto-reapply material thing on mesh reload yet but we'll look into it.
Sorry I can't respond to everyone's posts here individually, just wanted to pop in and say we're working on it and some of the stuff that's been suggested is in there now.
From the user manual: "Gloss map treated as a multiplier on global Spec sharpness slider"
Personally, I find it awkward to have a global specular sharpness value on each shader AND a gloss map working in tandem. I think it would make more sense if, when you load a gloss map, it overrides the specular sharpness slider entirely. I would even rename the specular sharpness slider "Gloss" and have it gray out if a gloss map is loaded. That way you're using the same jargon for that shader property whether the input is from a texture map or a constant value. If an area needs to be more glossy, I'd rather do it right and just make that area brighter in my gloss map, not puppeteer a funky balance between my texture and the global value.
You can set the slider to the max value and leave it there, while making changes with your texture maps if you don't want to fuss with the slider.
The slider makes it more flexible, if say, you're loading content created for a different engine, or if you want to quickly see how more or less glossiness overall with your material will look.
You can also use the slider to maximize the tonal range. IE: say you want a very dull material, but you want some variation to it. If you make the gloss almost black in your texture, the value range is very small to work with. You can use more of the image range in this case and adjust the slider.
While I do own Marmo, I admittedly haven't used it as much as I would have liked, so my apologies if these suggestions are already fixable/present:
1) The glass material never works well for me. Depending on the camera angle and closeness, the chunks with this material applied will disappear completely which really reduces the quality of my beauty shots.
2) It would be great if the output screen shot could be a PNG or equivalent format which supports background transparency. It's much more convenient for me to set the background color in Photoshop.
The only thing I could ask for is a Mac OS version. Really, everytime I need to use Marmoset (and it is a lot lately) I need to reboot and open windows trough bootcamp. Of course, this is a pain in the...
If I'm working in my customized photoshop in mac (with plugins, brushes, etc), I need to check in real time my textures. Please, I really think there's a lot of people working on Mac too. Also, the videogame industry is becoming more mac-friendly nowadays, especially since maya is a popular software for 3d artist and it is available on mac.
2) It would be great if the output screen shot could be a PNG or equivalent format which supports background transparency. It's much more convenient for me to set the background color in Photoshop.
Toolbag 1 saves a mask into the alpha channel when you output a TGA (the default format). We plan on supporting more image formats in general though.
The only thing I could ask for is a Mac OS version. Really, everytime I need to use Marmoset (and it is a lot lately) I need to reboot and open windows trough bootcamp. Of course, this is a pain in the...
If I'm working in my customized photoshop in mac (with plugins, brushes, etc), I need to check in real time my textures. Please, I really think there's a lot of people working on Mac too. Also, the videogame industry is becoming more mac-friendly nowadays, especially since maya is a popular software for 3d artist and it is available on mac.
This is something I can 100% verify we will have. Infact, the early build of TB2 is already running on OSX and the copy we were showing off at GDC was running on a Macbook pro.
heh, i asked a few sites back, seems noone wants to answer.
i actually asked before i bought it a few weeks ago, so yeah, am lloking forward to an answer aswell.
Sorry I can't really give any specifics on pricing or licensing yet. Toolbag 2 will not be a free upgrade, but there will be benefits for existing licensees. That's all I can say at this point.
BTW EarthQuake, I wanted to say thanks for making the tutorials on the Toolbag website. I've been through them a few times and really gotten a lot out of them. Very appreciated man.
- more fileformats supported: png, tiff and otherformats that are frequently used (and surely mentioned by others already)
- adding objects to the scene: At the moment everything I want to display in my scene needs to be in one file. I think it would make some things easier if you could just add another fbx or obj file to your existing scene
- seperate map-inputs for all map-types: makes things easier and faster
- seperation of specular & cubemap reflection: turning down secular effects should not remove cubemap reflections
- having cubemap reflections seperated from sky-lighting such that cube-map reflection are availabel even if skylighting is turned down
This is something I can 100% verify we will have. Infact, the early build of TB2 is already running on OSX and the copy we were showing off at GDC was running on a Macbook pro.
Hey, another thing that could be really cool would be to be able to manually call the reload of ALL the textures.
Sometimes I work with "auto-reload textures" disabled (for performance purpose) and I'm forced to hit every reload buttons in a material slot. Do you think it could be possible to call every reload button with something like the F5 key (like refreshing a page with a web browser) ?
I'm not sure if this has been said before but maybe have a few objects ready to be viewed with a tileable texture on like crazy bump/Unity/UDK does. A sphere, plane and a cube perhaps? I think it would be a nice idea.
That and I ditto what has already been said about the textures jumping out when loading an updated mesh with chunks.
I'm not sure if this was stated or not but an improvement I'd like to see is a change to how Marmoset generates the hardware ID. I keep having to have mine reset and I'm not sure why.
It seems like if you install a piece of software the ID changes (I just installed CryEngine and that caused Marmoset to stop working).
I love Marmoset but I rarely use it since I do not make many game graphics but it is tedious to have to get my license reset each time I do want to use it.
As for actual features I'm not sure I can add much to what has already been said, I only got to use it twice but I loved the simplicity of it.
EDIT: Omg I just saw the OSX news! This makes me very happy!
1. - The ability to switch quickly between Photoshop and Toolbag while drawing textures plus the ability to get some nice cubemap-based lighting outside 3ds' sluggish viewport is what sold Toolbag to me
2. - Some control over the pivot point of imported objects would be very welcome. On my system, OBJs carry on the pivot info from 3ds 2011 fine but the normals get wonky once a certain face threshold is crossed, FBX imports don't keep their pivot somehow but don't break the normals - good times ensue trying to set up a scene with multiple objects!
3. - See 2.
4. - Having to reload & reapply materials whenever I change parts of the mesh or the UVs
Some kind of PS connectivity? So that any changes in PS update in real-time without the need to save.
I've always had issues with marmoset's UI, for example if I drag the window to the top of my second monitor to fullscreen it, the whole UI offsets from where it will receive input.
1. - The ability to switch quickly between Photoshop and Toolbag while drawing textures plus the ability to get some nice cubemap-based lighting outside 3ds' sluggish viewport is what sold Toolbag to me
Not sure how that is supposed to improve workflow, have you tried painting in 3dcoat, zbrush or mudbox or even the photoshop 3d tools?
Personally Id like to see some physically based shading support
Nice job on the unity integration looks crazy awesome.
Some sort of ability for exports of lights from max/maya might be interesting. Not sure how lucrative it would be though.
Not sure if this has been mentioned yet, but the ability to change the resolution of your textures inside Toolbag would be handy. Sometimes when I'm working on a source 2048 I'd like to be able to see how it would look mipped down a level or two without having to save a new size out of Photoshop.
Replies
Visualizing my models quickly with nice IBL.
Workflow Overhaul:
- Light placement. I'd love a split view, or a picture-in-picture. In fact, a separate window which showed the last viewed camera angle while the main window was usable for light placement would be great. You could then exit light placement mode and return to the original angle.
- Gloss map file field. Gloss in the spec alpha is fine, but I think that should be enabled via a checkbox that overrides a separate, dedicated gloss map field.
New Features:
- I would love to be able to set the tangent space to match something else (like 3dsmax, for instance). I'm having all sorts of mirror seams, wierd normals only on mirrored faces, etc. which are preventing me from using marmoset on my latest project.
- Light setup saving would be awesome
- My dream feature is a node-based material editor!
Least liked:
- Tangent space issues
Thanks for all your hard work guys, Toolbag is an awesome tool and I can't wait to see what you do with it!
Just few things you might be see as minor
-Undo - after get a nice setting, light position, post effect value, sky intensity etc, unless we save the scene, if we do some changes and not happy with that, it will be so great if we can revert with undo
-obj update -Eventually working with unfinish model which I mean just testing some material and texture applied on model, after modified the model and updated OBJ marmoset reset all with default, spesific shader set gone and need to recall and reapply, at least marmoset can recognize obj naming so obj will update with material still applied there
-Cheers
-Xnormal synched normals
thanks!
My biggest issue is that the point lights dont seem to effect surfaces that are behind another using blend modes.
for example if the eyes are using a wet layer set to add blend mode. than the eye geometry wont catch any lighting from the point lights and will be darker than the rest of the mesh. it works using the environment lighting though
Yes, alpha should be saved if you're exporting your screenshots with a format like TGA that supports alpha. Also if you're exporting a series of still images for a 3d spin to compile into a video, alpha should be saved as well.
I'm not sure about direct video export, I'm not sure which video codecs even support alpha channels? If anyone has a suggestion or more information on that, that would be great.
Dylan: The point lights thing, yeah there are some general bugs right now with dynamic lights and blend modes. I'm not sure if this will help, but try turning off shadow casting on your wet layer.
Thanks, I verified this and got it into our bug system here, should be fixed in a future release, not sure if it will get into the next patch though.
No, sorry for the confusion, 1.08 (and 1.09) are minor patch releases.
We're collecting feedback for the next major release. We've got a lot of exciting new stuff that we want to add, but its going to take us some time to pull it all off.
We still plan on releasing bug fixes and things like that for V1, but we've really outgrown a lot of the back-end stuff with the current version, the UI and the basic scene structure are outdated so we're focused on a core-rewrite of a lot of our systems that will aid is in future development. This will also give us the ability to get on some other systems, like OSX for instance, that we weren't able to do previously due to reliance on some windows specific bits of code.
You can expect to see some major changes from us in the not so distant future.
We had some technical issues with the site, it should be back up soon!
I'm excited to see what the future holds for Marmoset.
Thanks for letting me know.
First, I'd like to see support for more formats. The regular format you find online is .hdr, and Marmoset doesn't support that. I have to open the image in Photoshop, save out as a PBM, rename it in Windows to .BFM (they're the same, but Marmoset won't load the PBM that Photoshop names it by default). It would be nice to just load .HDR files directly.
Second, I can't seem to get the nice shadows that some of the default Skies have. It would be nice if there was some way to just do quick overall tweaks to a Sky, like say Saturation, or a Hue shift, or even a temperature shift. There's one I'd really like to use, but it's just a bit too warm. And I can't figure out how to just desaturate it a bit in Photoshop, as that seems to kill the shadows (for some reason) when I import it back through the Sky Tool.
Edit:
Oh, also, Omni-light shadows.
Some more control over the existing sky presets(like color, saturation, contrast) is high on my list too.
However, have you gone through the sky tool tutorial?
http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/skytool
This may help with some of your shadow issues.
If you have, can you post some images of your issues?(maybe in the toolbag questions thread). I'm not an expert with the sky tool, but I can check with our tools guys and see if they have any advice if you can give me some specific examples of what sort of result you're getting, and an explanation of what you'd like to achieve.
On the left is the Pisa sky. On the right I took the image from \base\sky\pisa and ran it through the sky tool. The result seems quite unpredictable to me. This one is pretty indicative of how it is with the rest of the HDR images I'm using. On the left is how I would expect it, on the right is how it actually comes out. Usually much more washed out, with unclear shadows.
I think another useful thing would be to allow for custom meshes in the sky tool, instead of just those spheres. That way I could preview what it's actually going to look like.
Ok so, its hard to tell you exactly why you're seeing different results here, but a few things:
A. the exposure for both of your examples are different, if you even that out you might get better results
B. If you're loading the .TGA file from the pisa sky, what you're doing is loading the 8-bit file meant for the skybox display, not an HDR source file(which is what you want to start with).
C. The shadow map is really just a copy of your cubemap, but with the bright light sources Photoshopped out.
I grabbed one of the HDR cubes from Paul Debevec's site here:
http://www.pauldebevec.com/Probes/
Then I photoshoped out the brightest highlights for the "shadow" image, I just clone stamped them out, I don't think you have to be super accurate with it.
Also, when you save your PFM file out of photoshop, just type the extension there at the end of the file name, then you won't have to rename it.
I am curious, this has been mentioned a few times but which file types would you guys like to see supported?
- changing between perpective camera, and orthographic top-bottom, left-right, front-back views vithout loosing your camera placement would be really useful when messing around light placements (easy access from the ui maybe?)
- also split views would be really useful when placing stuff in 3d
- easier saving projects (without having to save my mesh and materials separately first model by model..) so e.g. when i save my scene, it saves ereything into it's folder that i see there
opening a new mesh clearing materials is also painful
- separate texture slots for every map! no alphas! coz it's ment to be easy and confortable way of presenting your work and tweaking stuff is a pain in the butt with saving glow and stuff into alpha channel (plus i don't use marmoset every day, so i forget where i have to use alpha anyways)
- support for more UV channels, at least 1 and 2 (would be a bonus to even be able to animate U and V panning /for animated textures/ on each channel by moving and/or rotating them plus mabye their visibility and being able to change how the tho channels are blended /multiply, add etc./)
+ tiling settings?
- turntable anims could be really laggy even with quite low settings, so it would be awsome to have an option for "pre-rendering" my turntable. meaning: marmoset could save my turntable video like a non-realtime render, to make sure my turnable vid won't be laggy at all. if it makes sense
- applying multimaterials based on imported mesh info (if the model i import to marmoset had multiple materials applied to different parts of the same mesh. it would be useful if marmoset could load that information somehow (like Material ID), right now the only way i can apply multiple /separate/ shaders onto a model is to detach each part i'd like to apply a different material to)
- FBX import with textures/shaders set up automatically *AGREED!!
+ also FBX-animation import
- being able to pose a fully rigged character with IK or a character with FK
thanks for all the love you give to the community
Marmoset is fun to use but at the same time i always hope with time you guys will get rid of every annoying things this software has
keep up the great work!
TIF. I export everything to Crytif since I use Cryengine most of the time and it's a paint to save out a separate copy for no reason except to look at it in Marmoset if I'm just texturing.
what i mean by this, is that you use a simple check-box to tell Marmoset whether your maps were baked in Max, Maya, or xNormal, and Marmoset uses the appropriate tangent calculation. it really shouldn't be that difficult to do, right? it's just swapping out a single line of math based on a boolean operation.
Or should i wait for the next version and buy that one directly?
Model viewing and lighting
Which feature(s) or function(s) of Marmoset Toolbag do you think would benefit from a workflow overhaul?
The material system. It's way too easy to get your materials dropped from your mesh by mistake. For example, reloading the mesh and you lose all your materials and you have to import them again.
Which new feature(s) would you like to see in Marmoset Toolbag?
I think the lighting system needs a bit more of work. I would like to see a) some more light types and b) the ability to snap lights to vertices. Using the manipulator to move lights around is too time-consuming.
I also strongly suggest you add reflectivity/cube map support. I recently tried importing a car into Marmoset and it's difficult to make it look good when specularity and reflectivity is the "same thing".
The third thing I would like to ask you about is to overlook some of the post effects. Ambient occlusion and DOF is quite buggy for me. I often get dark/grey mesh parts - which somehow has something to do with camera distance and angle. My stuff looks fine from some angles but completely fucked from others. It would also be nice to have a few sliders for the AO options - so that we can for example increase or lower the detail of the AO.
What do you like least about Marmoset Toolbag?
There's nothing I "dislike" in Marmoset but the lack of reflectivity map support is the biggest nuissance atm.
If you’ve used the Marmoset Toolbag trial but decided not to purchase, what were the main reasons for that choice?
I own a legal copy so don't worry about it
Maybe, I could ask this too : the possibility to setup a grid (like in maya) + a snap to move some objects on it ?
I often switch between Marmoset and photoshop and sometimes I stay on photoshop for long minutes. Since Marmoset seems to only reload the texture when the windows get the focus back, I don't think it's necessary to keep the render updated (or maybe make this toggleable). I often minimize Mamroset in the taskbar just to stop the rendering, otherwise my GPU go crazy because the window is visible, even if I'm not working with it.
Other things I would like:
1. The ability to move meshes around in the scene, allowing us to compose different scenes with the same assets without having to reimport objects and reapply materials, etc
2. Renaming objects in the scene. I'm a lazy artist in Maya, I don't name until I export, and even then I'm still lazy and name it something dumb half of the time. When I bring it into Toolbag, I would like to be able to rename it then, so I will have "head" "body" "armor" etc, instead of "poly_cube1.obj" "poly_sphere3.obj" etc
Yeah, Yosuke Ishikawa is awesome!
You'll be happy to know that pretty much everything you're asking for here is in our early build of Toolbag 2 now. We don't have the auto-reapply material thing on mesh reload yet but we'll look into it.
Sorry I can't respond to everyone's posts here individually, just wanted to pop in and say we're working on it and some of the stuff that's been suggested is in there now.
You can set the slider to the max value and leave it there, while making changes with your texture maps if you don't want to fuss with the slider.
The slider makes it more flexible, if say, you're loading content created for a different engine, or if you want to quickly see how more or less glossiness overall with your material will look.
You can also use the slider to maximize the tonal range. IE: say you want a very dull material, but you want some variation to it. If you make the gloss almost black in your texture, the value range is very small to work with. You can use more of the image range in this case and adjust the slider.
1) The glass material never works well for me. Depending on the camera angle and closeness, the chunks with this material applied will disappear completely which really reduces the quality of my beauty shots.
2) It would be great if the output screen shot could be a PNG or equivalent format which supports background transparency. It's much more convenient for me to set the background color in Photoshop.
If I'm working in my customized photoshop in mac (with plugins, brushes, etc), I need to check in real time my textures. Please, I really think there's a lot of people working on Mac too. Also, the videogame industry is becoming more mac-friendly nowadays, especially since maya is a popular software for 3d artist and it is available on mac.
If you can get it in 2.0 and be ahead of the curve versus catching up.
Toolbag 1 saves a mask into the alpha channel when you output a TGA (the default format). We plan on supporting more image formats in general though.
This is something I can 100% verify we will have. Infact, the early build of TB2 is already running on OSX and the copy we were showing off at GDC was running on a Macbook pro.
Tragic to quote myself, but I am still wondering about this :poly136:
i actually asked before i bought it a few weeks ago, so yeah, am lloking forward to an answer aswell.
Awesome, I'm happy to hear it!
Things I like to see in marmoset:
- more fileformats supported: png, tiff and otherformats that are frequently used (and surely mentioned by others already)
- adding objects to the scene: At the moment everything I want to display in my scene needs to be in one file. I think it would make some things easier if you could just add another fbx or obj file to your existing scene
- seperate map-inputs for all map-types: makes things easier and faster
- seperation of specular & cubemap reflection: turning down secular effects should not remove cubemap reflections
- having cubemap reflections seperated from sky-lighting such that cube-map reflection are availabel even if skylighting is turned down
- Collada file format support
Sometimes I work with "auto-reload textures" disabled (for performance purpose) and I'm forced to hit every reload buttons in a material slot. Do you think it could be possible to call every reload button with something like the F5 key (like refreshing a page with a web browser) ?
That and I ditto what has already been said about the textures jumping out when loading an updated mesh with chunks.
It seems like if you install a piece of software the ID changes (I just installed CryEngine and that caused Marmoset to stop working).
I love Marmoset but I rarely use it since I do not make many game graphics but it is tedious to have to get my license reset each time I do want to use it.
As for actual features I'm not sure I can add much to what has already been said, I only got to use it twice but I loved the simplicity of it.
EDIT: Omg I just saw the OSX news! This makes me very happy!
2. - Some control over the pivot point of imported objects would be very welcome. On my system, OBJs carry on the pivot info from 3ds 2011 fine but the normals get wonky once a certain face threshold is crossed, FBX imports don't keep their pivot somehow but don't break the normals - good times ensue trying to set up a scene with multiple objects!
3. - See 2.
4. - Having to reload & reapply materials whenever I change parts of the mesh or the UVs
I've always had issues with marmoset's UI, for example if I drag the window to the top of my second monitor to fullscreen it, the whole UI offsets from where it will receive input.
Not sure how that is supposed to improve workflow, have you tried painting in 3dcoat, zbrush or mudbox or even the photoshop 3d tools?
Personally Id like to see some physically based shading support
Nice job on the unity integration looks crazy awesome.
Some sort of ability for exports of lights from max/maya might be interesting. Not sure how lucrative it would be though.