Tutorial: Complex material creation in Marmoset Toolbag
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As some of you probably saw in my Leica thread, I'm going to be doing some tutorials and documentation for Marmoset Toolbag. I'm really excited to take up a more permanent position on the Marmoset team and even more excited about some of things that we'll be working on in the future (*ahem* http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=115236).
We just got the first one up, so check it out!
http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/materials
It goes over the basics of material creation, how Toolbag's unique image based lighting system affects your textures as well as covering some of the common material types you might want to mimic in your textures.
I hope you guys find this useful, I'm going to be doing a series of tutorials in the near future so keep an eye out. I've got another writeup covering the displacement mapping stuff here that is just about done.
We just got the first one up, so check it out!
http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/materials
It goes over the basics of material creation, how Toolbag's unique image based lighting system affects your textures as well as covering some of the common material types you might want to mimic in your textures.
I hope you guys find this useful, I'm going to be doing a series of tutorials in the near future so keep an eye out. I've got another writeup covering the displacement mapping stuff here that is just about done.
Replies
The subject for the displacement mapping is also something I have not being able to find a lot of info about so I am going to be checking back for that.
Thanks, I'm glad you find it helpful!
Yeah the displacement mapping stuff was something I felt that was really under documented and not really understood, I'm not sure most people even know we support it. My next tutorial will go over a lot of the technical aspects of displacement mapping, but also the artistic side as well.
any hope this could be a series and go over of different materials? it's always so tricky to get the definition right and it makes such a big difference.
Hazardous, or anyone else that hasn't tried toolbag in a while, especially if you haven't tried it since proper gloss map support was added should definitely give it a go again! The gloss map thing really makes creating varied materials a lot easier, much better than the old 1 gloss setting per material setup.
Also I had some strangeness going on when downloading the example zip, it would (in ff 18 ) just stop after a minute (still reporting that it's downloading though), I'd have to pause/unpause to get it going again. Probably a FF bug though.
just my $0.02
In this case I'm using complex to refer to the fact that I'm doing multiple surface types in with one material(material as in a marmoset material), as apposed to a simple material where you're only trying to represent one or two surface types.
I agree that you can definitely take the art content further than I have here, as far as the actual detail work, depending on the amount of wear you want to show, the art style you're going for etc. I wanted to keep my content here fairly simple and clean so its clear what I'm doing, and the mat values don't get lost in a bunch of effects and overlays and what not.
so normals, diffuse, specular, and gloss would cover that. and really within a single texture sheet you should be able to fit your entire asset and define those materials, i'd expect that to be the basic requirement for most job roles in the current generation.
i wasn't trying to knock you or the content of this tutorial, i think it's great! but i do think it covers the basic expectations that artists should be looking to achieve.
I actually went back and forth on the "complex" part of the title wondering if it got the point across, so yeah maybe it could have been worded differently. I think I'll stick with it now though just to keep all of our links and publicity stuff consistent.
I bought the new one the other week so I'm going to go through the whole texture process of my new character with marmoset in mind and hopefully get some good results, stuff like this is a great help
cheers
Just out of curiosity, how feasible would it be to construct an entire scene in Marmoset? As opposed to UDK or CryEngine?
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=115236
Currently (1.08 ) Marmoset Toolbag is set up as more of a simple model viewer. You can load in multiple objects for a scene but you will have to set it up in your 3d editor of choice first, and you won't be able to move objects around or anything like that directly in Toolbag. You can set up cameras and lights and things like that as well, but you'll probably find that UDK/Crytek has more advanced features suited to scene/level building.
For the next major revision we're really focusing on making scene creation and management much more powerful and easier to use. multiple object support, moving objects/lights/cameras, creating groups, better systems/ui for dealing with multiple objects and materials, that sort of thing.
If there are any specific tools or features you'd like to see you should post in the feedback thread: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=115236
good news!!