Tutorial: Basic Lighting Methods in Marmoset Toolbag

EarthQuake · Feb 2013

I've got another Toolbag tutorial up. This one goes over the basics of the lighting system, sky lighting, dynamic lighting and how to tweak the settings to blend both methods together, as well as some of the less documented features like the advanced dynamic light settings and what not.

http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/lighting

I'll be doing a second part to this series next, covering techniques specific to portrait / character lighting that will cover more of the artistic side of lighting as well.

bounchfx · Feb 2013

Really great stuff EQ. These tuts are wonderful and extend far beyond just marmoset. Looking forward to any others you do!

Stromberg90 · Feb 2013

Ah, thats cute..

We all know you are not sorry for that awesome lens flare image

We all love it

Really nice that toolbag get's more tutorials

maximumsproductions · Feb 2013

Sweet, EQ

, can't wait to watch this and part 2 in the future.

TrevorJ · Feb 2013

coooo beans

cw · Feb 2013

EarthQuake wrote: »

I've got another Toolbag tutorial up. This one goes over the basics of the lighting system, sky lighting, dynamic lighting and how to tweak the settings to blend both methods together, as well as some of the less documented features like the advanced dynamic light settings and what not.

http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/lighting

I'll be doing a second part to this series next, covering techniques specific to portrait / character lighting that will cover more of the artistic side of lighting as well.

You do very nice tutes.

I'm enjoying them. Thank you EQ.

[HP] · Feb 2013

I am absolutely loving this little articles you are putting together. A pure joy to read.

Jeff Parrott · Feb 2013

Thanks for this EQ! You have no idea how helpful this and the previous ones are. Please keep doing these for Marmoset. One going over the various render tab options would be great. Also explaining to people to adjust the focal length (and the thought process behind the value in Marmoset) would be smaller but nice. I see people (including myself early on) not adjusting that at all and needing too. Thanks again man! Keep it up!

EarthQuake · Feb 2013

Thanks guys, really glad you're enjoying these tutorials! We plan to keep them going here for a good while, there is still plenty of material to cover, and as we add new tools and features in the future there will be even more stuff. So no sign of stopping here =D

bounch: Yeah I try to roll in as many general concepts as I can, this one is probably the most toolbag specific one so far, but even then if your engine supports IBL (which is becoming more mainstream these days) and dynamic lighting, a lot of it should transfer over.

Jeff: That is certainly something I want to touch on, the FOV/Perspective issue is a really important, like choosing the right lens in photography, you want to choose the right FOV camera setting to get the sort of perspective distortion/compression that will work best for your asset. I will probably do a general "presentation" tutorial at some point that rolls the camera settings, DOF settings, post effects, etc into a nice package.

Though I will probably start working on a skin shader tutorial afeter the character lighting tutorial is finished up. We updated the skin shader a while back and it is much, much more powerful than the basic skin shader we had when Toolbag was released. We've got no documentation on it either really, so all of the translucency parameters, how the texture inputs should look etc, theres a lot I want to talk about there. So it will probably be a little while before I can onto the camera/presentation stuff, but it certainly is on my short list to do.

Goeddy · Feb 2013

yeah a skin tutorial would be super awesome.
at the moment its always a lot of fiddling around till it "looks right".
but in the end you have absolutely no idea how all the translucency parameters realy work and how to optimaly prepair your maps to amplify the shaders potential.