TB2 beta thread
mod
Pre-order discount!
The beta will continue as a private beta until launch, at which point we will have a trial version available for everyone to try. Due to the positive reception we've gotten so far and the great feedback from our private testers we've decide to skip the public beta and go straight to release.
Anyone who has contacted me recently about getting in the beta, sorry, we're not going to add anyone else due to the official release coming up shortly.
Whats new in Toolbag 2?
This thread is open to everyone however, not only the private beta testers. If you guys have questions or comments about TB2, I will do my best to try and answer them.
You can also contact us at support@marmoset.co for any issues that you are not comfortable with or able to share publicly.
PS: If I (or anyone from Marmoset) contacted you about the private beta and you have not received a tester agreement, please get in touch either via PM or email at earthqke@marmoset.co.
We've noticed that people have been shooping in the TB2 logo to screenshots, so we figured we'd make it easy for you guys:
Zip file with alpha'd PNGs for TB2 logo
UPDATE: NEW BUILD Toolbag 2.0 b2 is out!
If you’re in the beta program you should get an email notification about the new build with download links. If you’ve got a build already, launch it and you should get a prompt to update (if you do not get a prompt, check your firewall/anti-virus settings and make sure internet access is granted for toolbag.exe, or follow the link in the email to the manual update download).
We’ve changed/added a bunch of stuff, including a revamped skin shader, tweaks to the UI and general usability, re-organized the material editor for improved flexibility, metalness reflectivity mode, object visibility, ao/cavity map support, detail normal map support, and much more. Check the full list of changes here:
Toolbag 2 beta 2 changelog
Some notes:
UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE: Private beta build 3.. ERR 4 is out!
If you've got a build, load it up and you should get a notice to update.
This build comes wit the usual spattering of new features and bug fixes, including UNDO, some tweaks to the movement/rotation widget, anisotropic specular shader(make sure to set both reflectivity and gloss to aniso to use) microfiber shader (lambert + fuzz yay!), focus tracking to keep your model in focus while adjust the camera, properly synced normal maps from 3ds max and a variety of other things.
Minor update 4:
B4 is out with a few fixes and new features. Ansio now actually works (yay!), the skin shader bug that was found has been fixed, selection of focus point with MMB (when using DOF, this rules, try it!), some new key combos for navigation on laptops w/o MMB (alt+shift for pan, ctrl+shift for focus point), and some updates to preferences and visibility stuff.
The full changelog can be found here:
Toolbag beta build 3 changelog
Thank you guys so much for the feedback you’ve given so far, and as always, let us know what you think!
The beta will continue as a private beta until launch, at which point we will have a trial version available for everyone to try. Due to the positive reception we've gotten so far and the great feedback from our private testers we've decide to skip the public beta and go straight to release.
Anyone who has contacted me recently about getting in the beta, sorry, we're not going to add anyone else due to the official release coming up shortly.
Whats new in Toolbag 2?
This thread is open to everyone however, not only the private beta testers. If you guys have questions or comments about TB2, I will do my best to try and answer them.
You can also contact us at support@marmoset.co for any issues that you are not comfortable with or able to share publicly.
PS: If I (or anyone from Marmoset) contacted you about the private beta and you have not received a tester agreement, please get in touch either via PM or email at earthqke@marmoset.co.
We've noticed that people have been shooping in the TB2 logo to screenshots, so we figured we'd make it easy for you guys:
Zip file with alpha'd PNGs for TB2 logo
UPDATE: NEW BUILD Toolbag 2.0 b2 is out!
If you’re in the beta program you should get an email notification about the new build with download links. If you’ve got a build already, launch it and you should get a prompt to update (if you do not get a prompt, check your firewall/anti-virus settings and make sure internet access is granted for toolbag.exe, or follow the link in the email to the manual update download).
We’ve changed/added a bunch of stuff, including a revamped skin shader, tweaks to the UI and general usability, re-organized the material editor for improved flexibility, metalness reflectivity mode, object visibility, ao/cavity map support, detail normal map support, and much more. Check the full list of changes here:
Toolbag 2 beta 2 changelog
Some notes:
- The material system re-order will break existing scene files. The scenes will still open, but you may need to set up your materials again (the materials should still be assigned to the appropriate mesh chunks.
- We still have some general scale issues, we have ideas that we’re working on to deal with it, however, please bear with us for the moment. You may notice that some of the settings in the skin shader are very scale-dependent. If the skin shader looks borked, check your mesh scale. A quick way to check mesh scale is to move your mesh around in the viewport and then check the numbers in the transform tab of the object properties - if the numbers say something like 1243 units, try scaling your mesh down in your 3d app and re-importing it.
UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE: Private beta build 3.. ERR 4 is out!
If you've got a build, load it up and you should get a notice to update.
This build comes wit the usual spattering of new features and bug fixes, including UNDO, some tweaks to the movement/rotation widget, anisotropic specular shader(make sure to set both reflectivity and gloss to aniso to use) microfiber shader (lambert + fuzz yay!), focus tracking to keep your model in focus while adjust the camera, properly synced normal maps from 3ds max and a variety of other things.
Minor update 4:
B4 is out with a few fixes and new features. Ansio now actually works (yay!), the skin shader bug that was found has been fixed, selection of focus point with MMB (when using DOF, this rules, try it!), some new key combos for navigation on laptops w/o MMB (alt+shift for pan, ctrl+shift for focus point), and some updates to preferences and visibility stuff.
The full changelog can be found here:
Toolbag beta build 3 changelog
Thank you guys so much for the feedback you’ve given so far, and as always, let us know what you think!
This discussion has been closed.
Replies
So excited, cant wait to get the download link
Yep, no restrictions on showing images!
I would love to be able to put my car I am making in there, hint hint wink wink
Toolbag 2 will not be a free upgrade for Toolbag 1 users. Sorry, I can't give any details on pricing or discounts for existing users yet.
Anyways, I played around with it for a couple of minutes, will give it a real go this weekend. So far these are things I noticed, mostly small issues, but perhaps useful to know anyways
Awesome thanks! No issue is too small to be help, so please feel free to let us know even the most minor things you find.
Space hides and shows the UI, like TB1, but I can see how that would be really confusing for people haven't used TB1, seeing as the menu item to show it disapears. Good catch!
Have a few bug reports, suggestions and some cheesy images :P
Bug: One pixel line(see image)
Bug: Transform gizmo disappears(see image)
Bug: Black cubes when using local reflection.(see image)
Bug: Shaders to do not always appear before clicked on.
Suggestions:
Would be nice with a autofocus feature.
Would be nice to could right click in the outliner to create new objects.
Make the light color more apparent, I thought it was a checkbox.
Ability to import own background image.
Would be nice to be able to lock the camera.
Would be nice with a none option for sky, even though brightness can be set to 0.0
Images:
Highpoly viewed on toolbag2 with skin shader and dynamic lights.
Golden gun, used the gold preset inside toolbag2, was awesome
We don't have an official system requirements list yet. I think DX10 is a requirement, and I'm pretty sure we're going 64-bit only. Windows and OSX (10.6.8 or later).
Other than that, you really just want a big beefy video card for best performance, its basically a GPU based renderer so it really stresses the video card (cpu etc is not important). I've ran it on some lowly laptops with integrated Intel GPUs, and it runs, but not great with all the fancy stuff ticked on.
Sorry, pricing has not been finalized yet, I probably won't be able to comment on pricing until we're out of beta and the official 2.0 release is announced.
also a two sided toggler?
Intel Core 2 Duo 2,66 GHz
8 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT
Unfortunately, the performance is really choppy on my hardware, and it's barely usable with advanced features turned on, like depth of field.
Regarding interface, I found very useful the hotkeys used in Marmoset 1, especially the SHIFT key to rotate the environment, the TAB to switch between tabs and the SPACEBAR to toggle the UI; would be great to have these hotkeys, or at least the opportunity to map them.
Also, would be great to have the opportunity to create a transparent ground with only the shadow of the model on it, pretty like the ground works in Zbrush. Or, even better, a background shader, assignable to objects, transparent but with opaque shadows; such feature would create limitless opportunities for rendering and compositing.
I hope that someone else has the opportunity to try this beta with a more powerful Mac, as mine is way too old; nonetheless, I'm really excited to have Marmoset running on OSX!
I could get hair to look pretty sweet, with the dithered alpha.
All characters I show are made by SveinY
EarthQuake: That's pretty sweet, considering it's a real time render.
The character where "only" around 400.000 tri's, the vehicle though is on 2.3 million triangles and it loaded really fast.
I second this, i cant find it anywhere.
BUG: light widget disapears when directly between the model and the camera
Sugestions: can we have the spotlight widget with the cone back, I'm not seeing a correspondence between the current widget and the light direction.
is it worth the functionality of bringing the maps across when you duplicate a material?
first impressions:
- feels like a hybrid rendering system? some things feel like the old way of working (diffuse + spec = fudged values), other things feel physically based. kinda feel like if you're including different "specular types" like mirror/blinn-phong, you should maybe leave blinn-phong as the old style and move to the new workflow with a new specular type. reflectance colour in rgb, and reflectance value in alpha.
- previously there was order independent transparency advertised, i'm assuming this is something to be updated later as the current alpha settings feel extremely lacking. especially the lack of soft alpha... means things like eyeballs just can't be done "right" at the moment.
- would love to be able to duplicate meshes or groups in the selection menu on the left. it kinda feels redundant having the list there without being able to do anything with it when you can just drag and drop stuff onto objects in the viewport.
- why isn't there an option to have spec alpha as gloss yet? this has been asked for in toolbag 1 for so long!
- not sure if it's just a setting i've overlooked, but the backgrounds are always super blurry to me/showing the lowest mipmap? on the model reflections are fine, just not in the background.
- emission is extremely lacking right now. GIMME DAT BLOOM!
- new skin shader is friggin awesome.
- new AO settings are literally sex.
- tesselation is a LOT smoother than it used to be, although with smoothing set to full, and tesselation above 64, i've found you get artifacts in the reflections.
I definitely need to make something bespoke to truly test the capabilities, but those are just my first impressions.
oh and specs...
i7 3930k @ 3.4Ghz
32Gb RAM @ 1600Mhz
Asus GTX 670 2Gb
Aniso and more blending modes are not in yet but are planned, we've been focusing on the big rendering features so unfortunately there are still a few things that were in TB1 that are still missing in TB2.
Dithered transparency is the order independent transparency. It may not look awesome in the viewport, because it requires dithering and lots of sampling to work, but when you save out an image it should work well. For things like hair where its mostly solid with fuzzy edges, dithered transparency should be perfect. For things like gloss eye shells and glass, the refractive shader is probably what you will want but is unfortunately not in yet.
Sorry, There is no way to do two sided mats yet, you can work around it by duplicating and flipping the faces for now.
Thanks for the feedback!
A few things, space does still toggle the UI. CTRL now rotates the sky (shift is used to select multiple objects in the viewport).
Performance is heavily tied to GPU, so having an older GPU is going to limit you performance wise, especially with the DOF and screen space reflection effects. DOF performance is related to your max bokeh size setting, basically the narrower the DOF, the worse performance gets.
A couple things you can do for performance:
Set up a camera with DOF on, and then make another "working" camera with DOF off
Set the resolution setting in the render tab to half - this will look worse but should significantly improve performance.
You can open any image as a light environment and then click on the thumbnail to place dynamic lights, that will rotate with the environment, much better than TB1
Skin shader is awesome, it will need some playing with to get the most out of it but it made the crappy skin textures below look passable really quickly. top stuff....it being default on 100% peach fuzz is a bit of a paim, but a minor niggle.
I think that I will put the olga that I am working on through M2 because it does feel like it needs a different set of maps to M1
I miss the sunlight preset from M1, as that was the default light that I used for my main texturing, I think a good plain lighting option would be nice as all the current presets have quite a bit of character....does that make sense?
finally bugs:
my materials wont save maps, and will only save slider positions on the skin shader, both when opening a scene and importing previously exported materials back into a scene.
Turntable is clipping geo when it rotates similar to a near clip plane being set too low in maya, and when you stop it its snapping back to zero rather than staying in the position it was paused in.
pictures!! like I say excuse the skin, its me not finishing the maps properly rather than the skin shader
specs:
i7 970 @ 3.2Ghz
16Gb RAM @ 1600Mhz
Palit GTX460 2Gb
Edit* I decided to re render this asset & weeks after this post...TB2 is awesome
Thanks for the in-depth feedback dude.
The rendering system is physically based, if you load in properly calibrated textures, and set spec to 1, fresnel to 1, gloss to 1, with energy conservation on and load properly calibrated diffuse, spec/reflectance, gloss/roughness, and normals you've got a full PBR workflow. If you have a "roughness" map, simply enable "invert gloss" then you're using roughness.
However, not everyone has PBR calibrated art content, so we want the rendering and material system to be as flexible as possible. If you plug in PBR content and set it up correctly its a physically based renderer, if you plug in content that is eyeballed and eyeball the shader values, it isn't really PBR anymore. I hope that makes some sense.
Yeah the OIT is the dithered method as I said above, try it out with exported images with high sampling.
Me too.
Though the scene list is useful for other things, like grouping and parenting. Duplicating and visibility toggles will probably show up in a future release.
Actually that's the way it worked in TB1 (from the time that gloss maps were added to TB1), with gloss in the spec alpha, most people asked for gloss in a separate slot so that's what we've done. We will look into adding a checkbox or something to pull gloss out of spec alpha like TB1 if a lot of people want that though.
Yeah I was wondering that when looking at your screenshot. What focal length/FOV is your camera set to? If you've got a long focal length on the camera, you're zooming into a small portion of the skybox so you're resolution limited, and resolution may vary a bit with different skyboxes.
Can you try a variety of sky presets, and take some shots with the default FOV if you're still having the issue?
One thing I like to do, if I'm just presenting a single model, is turn on DOF, set the focus point past the model, turn near blur all the way down, then you've got a nice method for blurring the skybox background.
Bloom is in the per-camera settings with some tweakable values. Though what you probably want is a separate bloom/glow pass just for emissive stuff, right?
Awesome, yeah I would love to see what you can do with some content made specifically for TB2, especially the new skin shader and all of that. Thanks again for such detail feedback!
Old TB1 scene files are not supported I do not think, but if you load a .mesh file, it should load your materials and textures automatically. Everything is saved in one central file (aside from your actual textures - which have much better relative paths now), you shouldn't need to manually load materials in.
Yeah, you can easily load any panoramic image (though it should be HDR as well) and then click on the pano preview to place, and move directional lights that are parented to the sky. You can come back and move the lights at any time and the direction, color and intensity will update automatically (you can also manually adjust the values in the per-object light settings, which I usually do). No need to edit skies in the wierd editor or wait for sky content to process or deal with "baked in" light directions. We think this system is a lot better.
Slightly off topic but I'd love to see a full PBR mini contest on polycount/with toolbag 2. It might be smart to include some full PBR sample assets so people can break down how it works.
Thanks for the feedback!
The materials not saving is interesting, can you tell me what the path to your files is? Does it have non-english characters or anything like that?
Is there any plan to add some simple height map based vertex blending? Even if it was done in a 3d package and then the vert colors exported and read by toolbag? Then there could be a simple threshold control and that would be it.
No blend support puts a slight hiccup in my workflow for scenes which seems to be a major part of TB2, not terrible but would be a super great feature if simple enough to integrate?
regarding alpha of spec as gloss, wasn't the idea to be flexible and allow people to put maps wherever they want? It seems changing from one way to another will please some but annoy others who liked the spec alpha as gloss setup (and that's what your skyshop shaders use, so it makes sense to keep being consistent). Ideally any map should have the option for it's alpha to be any other slot.
Material blending of some sort will likely be added down the line.
Yep, Maya is in there now and works perfectly, Xnormal/Blender (Mikktspace) is about 95%, Max is in but totally broken still. The "default" tangent space seems to do a much better job as well. Its a per-mesh setting in the object properties.
Certainly having both methods would be more flexible, I agree.
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: Its very flexible. If you load art content with physically accurate values, and set up the shader correctly (which it mostly is by default) you've got a physically based workflow.
If you turn off energy conservation, eyeball your materials and shader values, you'll be able to work with a more traditional workflow as well.
Interesting question. Quixel's previewer in dDo runs Marmoset Skyshop, which is a set of tools for Unity. So anything that is available in Skyshop will be available for the Quixel guys.
Toolbag, in general terms, is likely to have more advanced/higher end rendering features, because we don't have the same restrictions that we do with Skyshop (which needs to preform extremely well in a wide variety of real time applications).
Its hard to give any specifics on what you can expect to see in Skyshop as apposed to Toolbag, you will probably see some overlap as both products continue to develop, but that's about all I can say.
Some of it depends on how Unity develops as an engine as well, there are some things we do technically in Toolbag that aren't really feasible to do in Unity currently, but may be in the future.
Hoping to try it out on something real soon.
Would be nice to set the screenshot folder ant the settings there to default after changing them, cause now I have to redo them every time I start a new scene.
Overall amazing application and great improvements. Best thing I liked was the horizon occlusion and tonemapping.
Point light I had to type a number higher than 10000 so I could see it. Would be nice if there's an automatic rescale or something.
I would also like to change the camera background color (if there is, i couldn't find it)
really sweet results I'm seeing/hearing! Can't wait to see the full version drop!
Absolutly love it so far.
Thinking about buying the real thing but will that mean i will get a free update of marma 2 when it comes out or will it be sold seperate?
p.s. i have a EVGA 660 ti if you want me to test M2
Right now if I get it right, you have to set your metal color in the specular map and set your diffuse to black on the metallic areas to make it work, which goes against the UE4 material system for example, where you put your metal color in the diffuse and simply use a metallic mask to set where the diffuse color should be transferred to the specular term.
The UE4 workflow allows to have only the diffuse as a color map, the other masks are greyscale (specular, roughness, metalic) and can be composited into a second rgb map, making it really efficient.
Also, you can't control the resolution of the substance textures.
I'll play a bit with it this week end and post some nice screenshots asap