Fantastic, can't wait to see all those stunning renders people will come up with!
Just one last thing I noticed in Beta 4, the random seed and output size settings of substances are not displayed, would be great if they were.
some issues with shadows, bot sure if this is GPU specific or a bug.
single-sided meshes only cast shadow from the back, ie. only when the backface is facing the light. it is supposed to work the other way around right ?
I'm getting the same issues with shadows on my comp too ( GTx680).
Yes, there is a new licensing system that is more permissive about this sort of thing (no more clumsy support-email-transfers). You'll have an account login and you can manage your own seats with it.
Very much. We have a huge list of stuff we want to add after release, alongside the usual big fixes and maintenance.
And yea, it's December 5th, not May 12, for those across the pond :P
Little question for people in my situation : since license will be more convenient now, what happen for people who bought two licenses to have Toolbag on two computers in the past ? Do we have to forget one of them ?
as a european .. this date makes no sense, it's in the past ...
but seriously though, cant wait to get my hands on this. and i'm glad, i get a discount for owning TB1
FYI, I just installed the new Toolbag 2.0b4 (Windows) on my HP EliteBook 8440p and had consecutive hard locks on launch that required a hard reboot of the system.
Systems Specs include:
HP EliteBook 8440p
Win 7 Service Pack 1
Intel Core i7 2.67 GHz
8.00 GB RAM
64 BIT OS
NVIDIA Quadro FX 380M
No, I caught it. Thanks! The crash on open bug we've got logged here, the sky visibility bug we've had reported but I've never been able to reproduce it, I see you're on a Mac though.
Is anyone else who is getting the sky vis crash bug on mac as well?
Little question for people in my situation : since license will be more convenient now, what happen for people who bought two licenses to have Toolbag on two computers in the past ? Do we have to forget one of them ?
We will not be offering additional discounts for users who have multiple licenses, however, upgrades are tied to your unique invoice ID, so you could let a friend use your extra license to get the upgrade discount as well.
Here are some bug reports, suggestions and ideas. Sorry in advance for the lengthy post !
And by the way : thank you for fixing the UI panel collapsing behavior for camera options, it feels great now
My specs are :
Win 7 Pro 64 Service pack 1
i7 920 @ 2.67GHz
24 gigs of RAM
GeForce GTX 460
I am breaking down the feedback as follows :
1 - Bugs and important missing features
These are the bugs that I frequently encounter at the time of b4. These are the problems or missing features that make the program feel "broken".
2 - Suggestions regarding major annoyances
These suggested changes and fixes would speed up the overall workflow when using Toolbag, as they would make important, often used actions much easier to perform and more intuitive. Think of it as the "teeth grinding" stuff that can be worked around but is rather annoying
3 - Suggestions regarding minor annoyances
These suggested changes and fixes wouldn't speed up the workflow that much, but would make it smoother and more intuitive, especially to newcomers. Some users might be more sensitive to these than others.
4 - Ideas for added features
These are possible additions that I think could benefit Toolbag. Most of them are related to current features, and some go further than a simple fix or change and introduce new ideas.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
1 - Bugs and important missing features
- The rotation "jumps" when typing-in angle values are still present (as highlighted in the earlier video).
- Need a distinction between object undo and camera undo (see Max)
- When Opening a scene in which some objects have previously been set as "hidden" before saving, all the objects are displayed, even if though they are correctly flagged as hidden in the outliner. I have to switch the eye icon on and off for these objects to actually disappear (as highlighted in the earlier video).
- Opening Toolbag and then browsing to open an existing file works fine ; however I am getting constant crashes when I try to open the program by double clicking any of my scene files. (still true with b4)
- The background skies are very low res - I understand that the overall lighting is derived from lower resolution sky maps, but shouldn't the background displayed in the viewport be at least 4k ?
- Not so much a bug but and more of an important missing feature : When saving using "save scene as",if the scene to be saved has been opened from an existing file, the "File name" dialog should already be filled with the name of the loaded file, so that the user can simply edit the name or increment it. See Photoshop.
- The top toolbar (where it says "Marmoset Toolbag 2.00b4 (pre-release) (64-bit)" ) should indicate the filename of the currently opened scene. The name should also display an appended " *" at the end of the name to indicate that a scene has been edited. (nameofthefile *). It's important in order to not overwrite important scenes by mistake.
- Let's say I have a specific camera that I like (all its settings are fine tuned, the DOF and FOV are just how I want them, and so on). If I want to create a slightly different variant of this camera, at the moment my only three choices are : editing this one camera destructively ; creating a new one from scratch and edit all its setting manually to match the original ; saving the scene to a new file just so that I can have the two camera saved. Instead, there should be an easy way to duplicate a camera, and/or a way to copy paste camera settings. (right-click options in outliner : duplicate camera ; delete camera ; select camera settings ; paste camera settings).
- There seems to be a bug related to sky visibility and reflections. When turning "Sky Background" off in the Render options, the overall tint is still there (as intended) but some intense hotspots in the reflections can disappear.
2 - Suggestions regarding major annoyances
(ie the teeth grinding stuff )
- Needs Q-W-E-R keys for select, move, rotate, scale of any scene element.
- Need square marquee selection of objects and lights in the viewport.
- Need shit-selection of multiple objects in the viewport (especially since the Outliner allows that already)
- Mousewheel zoom feels inverted compared to other 3D apps. Maybe add an option to invert this behavior if desired ?
- When manipulating hierarchies in the Outliner, I notice that the "Sky" and "Main Camera" items cannot be manipulated and rearranged, even though other objects can be re-arranged around them. That seems inconsistent, and prevents fast arrangement of Outliner items.
- There are cases when the outliner does not seem to outline anything. For instance, if an object is part of a parented and collapsed hierarchy, (therefore hidden from view in the depth of the expandable tree) it would be useful to have its parent highlighted in the list (with a different highlight color than the regular one) when the child object is selected by clicking it in the scene space. That way a maximum amount of information would be displayed at all times, without having to expand/explore hierarchies. This would instantly tell me if my objects are parented properly without having to fiddle with the outliner trees. (See Maya)
- Currently, selection in the Outliner only works when clicking right on the text name of the object. Selection should also work when clicking anywhere on the line representing the object. Especially since some users might actually have developed the habit of *not* clicking on the text name of object in tree hierarchies of other programs, in order to avoid accidental renaming.
- When a directional light is created, it appears in the 3D scene as an icon with an arrow (suggesting the directional nature of the light). However the arrow of that icon is pointing at an arbitrary angle. It would be nice if the icon could dynamically rotate, to indicate the direction that the light is actually pointing to. It might be best to simply not use an icon for the representation of such lights at all, and rather use a little 3D mesh instead.
- Same is true for Spot lights.
- Also, I would love to be able to switch the display of such light icons on and off at will for quick printscreens and for realtime review. Alt-spacebar could be used for that. This would also toggle off the grid if any, and all other scene indicators, but would keep the UI tabs visible.
- Need a world-based object manipulation feature (as opposed to local only currently)
- Need to be able to rotate objects and lights by grabbing the surface of a "control sphere". See Max.
- There needs to be a way to enable screen space object dragging at any time ("tweak mode"). Middle click-drag could work, from anywhere in the scene (no need to "touch" the object to drag it). See Maya.
- Is there currently a way to interactively scale an object up and down in the viewport ?
- The little "+" markers on material components panels should all expand into texture selection dialogs ; there should be no need for the user to specify that a texture slot should be created. I suppose this is related to shader optimization, but visually it looks strange to have "+" buttons expanding to nothing, as it feels like some feature is missing from the program. Maybe there could be an other way to specify if a certain channel is wanted ; and if not, the corresponding panel would simply not show up. This would then reduce visual clutter when editing material properties.
3 - Suggestions regarding minor annoyances (ie things that some users might notice, while others might not)
- When Toolbag opens up with its default scene, the default active camera is a bit confusing. I think there are two factors contributing to this : first, the camera rotates around itself, like mouse look in an FPS, as opposed to orbiting around a given center of interest like a regular Max/Maya camera would. And second, the sky dome environment, being infinite, does not offer any visual point of reference allowing the user to know where he/she is in the space of the scene when panning and zooming. A floor grid and/or an origin indicator would help.
The above problem does not occur when seeing the scene through a user-created camera. I would suggest the default Main Camera to behave just like this.
All this combined would make Toolbag feel more familiar, especially when first opening it.
- It is not possible to click out of dropdown menus by clicking the application top bar. This is expected from regular Windows apps.
- Deleting an object from the outliner is possible with the delete key, but it should also be possible to do so with a right-click context menu. This menu would include : Copy, Paste, Duplicate, Delete, Hide selection, Unhide selection, Freeze selection, Unfreeze selection, Create new material.
- It would be nice for the little eye icons for visibility toggle to work like Photoshop when click-dragging over them.
- The Add Mesh menu item for model import item feels a bit misplaced and misnamed. I would naturally expect it to be found under File > Import. The "Add" menu could probably be called "Create" and include the existing lights types but also simple primitives. (basic primitives like cube, spheres, and so on can be very useful for setting up shadow casting elements and white boxes for occlusion or light bouncing). Of course if this is implemented, there needs to be an option to scale meshes up and down as desired.
- On a related note, I would love to be able to populate this menu with my own meshes, as this would be very useful for loading reference characters and scale references. See the Mudbox folder structure for this.
- A setting for objects to occlude the ambient light coming from the sky.
- I wish the legacy Toolbag 1 skies were included ! I miss the garage. And of course it would help when it comes to comparing renders between TB1 and 2.
- It might be beneficial to have the materials present in the scene actually show up as outliner items. This would allow for fast scene cleanup and organization, with the option to filter them out visually if the user would rather not see them there. See Mudbox.
This would also allow the user to apply a material to an object simply from by grabbing a material from the outliner and releasing it on the desired object - either in the scene or the outliner.
- Once finished, Render Turntable should open the Windows Explorer folder containing the generated files.
- Also, shouldn't "Capture Turntable" actually render a full smooth turnaround (in uncompressed avi, or as TGA image sequence with alpha, to be converted into a video later) as opposed to screenshots from just a few discrete angles ?
- Free-look FPS camera could be useful, especially for navigation in large environment scenes. But it might benefit from an alternative input scheme, different from the Maya scheme. Think of the camera controls in Unreal Editor.
- There might need an FPS "fly/walk mode" controlled with WASD (and the arrow keysfor lefties ). That would be very cool for environment scenes.
- It would be nice if the user could manipulate the direction of non-point lights without having to actually grab them ; see the Mudbox input scheme for such off-hand manipulation (press down L and mouse-click-drag to control the direction of the last selected directional light). It makes a lot of sense for directional lights to work this way, as they do not really originate from a given point in space.
- Might need some simple snapping options for environment artists : Grab vertex and snap to grid ; grab object's axis and snap to grid ; grab object vertex and snap to other object vertex ; step rotate ; step move ; step scale ; align object to face.
- "Add > Mesh" could also create a new empty material and apply it to the newly imported model, as opposed to applying the "Default" one. And for clarity, the created material could be automatically named after the contents of the imported mesh. This material would have the same settings as "Default". That way, from there, all the user needs to do is to browser for the needed textures. Or delete the material if not needed.
- Might need a right-click dropdown context menu on material spheres. This menu would include : Create new material, Duplicate this material, Delete this material, Copy material settings, Paste material settings, Revert settings to default)
- Right-clicking the empty area in the Material Editor should bring up a context menu with : Create new material.
- Would be cool to have a few more material presets, using simple 128*128 tiling textures or even just plain RGB inputs : Cloth, Wet cloth, brick, Skin, Plaster, Wood From there the user would have a great reference to work from and tweak. There could also be a demo mesh for these with more proper UVs, like the Vray sphere. Maybe a penis tank ?
- It might be nice to be able to remap keys ; for instance, some users might like to have Frame bound to something else than ctrl-F (F for instance like in Toolbag1 )
- Need "Frame all" happening if the user hits the Frame key when no objects are selected.
- Is there any way to scale (= zoom out) the displayed sky ? I understand that it is a cheat and should better be performed by adjusting the FOV of the camera, but sometimes it might be useful for presentation purpose, to make an object appear smaller or bigger, and so on. See Keyshot.
- Right click could be used as a way to open a context menu, when right-clicking in the space of the scene. This menu could hold useful shortcuts for Copy selected, Pate Selected, Delete selected, Duplicate selected, Create new material, Create new material and assign to selected, Create light, and so on. See Max, Maya, Mudbox.
- On saving scene files : I wish there was a way to work with an optional project system, like in Max in Maya. While I actually like the fact that I can simply point Toolbag to texture files regardless of where they are located on my system, it can become a problem on complex large scene with multiple objects and textures. A simply "File>Create project folder" would let the user create an empty folder where wanted ; and "File>Point to project folder" would tell Toolbag that the indicated location should now be a default root location for scene files and textures (while still allowing to link to other locations, as normal). This would make projects easily portable, depending on relative paths as opposed to absolute paths.
"File>Use absolute paths" would revert the whole system (and the current scene paths) to absolute/default behavior.
- On a related note : I wish there was a way to "pack" any scene into a proper, portable project folder, regardless of messy texture links originally pointing to different absolute locations. To do that, Toolbag would fetch all the textures being used in the current materials of the scene, and move them to a new, user-defined project folder. This folder could then even be zipped, becoming a Toolbag-specific file format (see 3DSMax *.mzp, Winamp skins, and so on)
- Might need an option to lock the orientation of Directional Lights relatively to the camera angle (see Mudbox). And another option to lock them to the sky angle, making the sky "drag" the user lights along when shift-rotating it, consolidating the whole light components into a big lighting rig. Maybe this could be a per-light setting.
I'm testing it on a pretty powerful PC with a Quadro 4000 graphic card.
The skin shader is great and the light editor is crazy: here I'm using six directional lights generated from the evening construction environment, created just in a few seconds
- definitely needed scaling options for objects;
- directional lights need some visual feedback regarding their direction;
- I'd like to import and export shaders from one scene to one another; semtimes I spend quite a lot twaking a shader and would be cool to store it and use in different scenes, just like in TB1;
- I'd like to merge different TB scenes through an import/merge option: IE I can work on an environment and a character in different scenes and merge them when finished.
Hey guys!
I've been playing with it a lot last night and I had those bugs I've never had before.
First all the new scenes I made would lose all of the material/maps everytime I reopen them, And sometimes even if I am applyting the texture back on it, it still look like metal and very weird and I actually have to rebuild my material from scratch. I have this bug too that when I ctrl z (undo) It lost all of my scene texture and once again, when applying them back it would still look like metal and I would have to rebuilt all my material from scratch,
Happened to me like at leat 5 times last night and I was not having those kind of issues before,
Is there a specific way to set it up to prevent it from hapenning? Is is because all of my texture are not in the same folder than my toolbag scene? I always worked like that in toolbag 1 without issue.
i am getting some weird issues with contact refinement.
only happens when the camera is not too close to the mesh.
fyi, i scaled the mesh accordingly so that shouldn't be the problem.
i am getting some weird issues with contact refinement.
only happens when the camera is not too close to the mesh.
fyi, i scaled the mesh accordingly so that shouldn't be the problem.
I had the exact same thing yersterday! I wasn't sure if it was a bug or a graphic card issue
The B4 is a great update btw. It's coming along nicely.
There's one thing I've noticed that sometimes happens when changing Tangent Space on a mesh or adding Fuzz to the assigned shader. It looks like there are clipping plane issues with the camera. It's more visible with Fuzz on since it's like a fresnel in a way which highlights the edges. However, it's still visible in some cases even if you don't change the Tangent Space.
I've attached an example. Maybe there should be a Near/Far clipping plane option on the camera? If this is what's causing these artifacts that is.
I've attached an example. Maybe there should be a Near/Far clipping plane option on the camera? If this is what's causing these artifacts that is.
agreed, i was thinking the same thing since its visibility changed based on camera distance.
besides that, it would be good to have a shadow bias/tolerance setting for contact refinement so we can adjust the distance required to cast a close contact shadow.
Also i got a weird glitch (Im assuming it's a glitch) with reflections.
hey looked borked here:
but here with the mesh close to the glass, it looks better.
It looks like it could be the "Screen-space" in "Screen-space Reflections" doing you in. It can only reflect what's already rendered on screen, I believe.
ZacD- He's scaled according to that cube that was posted a while back, so I don't think thats it.
Joopson- Where is screen space reflection settings?
Oh, I'm sorry, I don't mean that there is a setting you can change, just that this is how SSR works. It reflects what's on screen. I'm unsure if there's a way to fix the problem in Marmoset 2; in fact, I've not used it. I'm assuming this is the problem though, because the majority of what would be reflected is not in view.
Here's an image showing some limitations of SSR, from CryEngine. The images are by Thomy over at CryDev.
Thanks for the breakdown Joopson, I understand now. Im hoping that this is something that can updated or changed at some point. I guess I'll have to get clever with my camera angles.
@Almighty-Gir- I could have missed something but we haven't got a glass shader yet in TB2, right? Hopefully the one they are working on will melt my socks.
Oh, I'm sorry, I don't mean that there is a setting you can change, just that this is how SSR works. It reflects what's on screen. I'm unsure if there's a way to fix the problem in Marmoset 2; in fact, I've not used it. I'm assuming this is the problem though, because the majority of what would be reflected is not in view.
Here's an image showing some limitations of SSR, from CryEngine. The images are by Thomy over at CryDev.
Yes, unfortunately this is simply a limitation of the screen-space reflection technique. As its a screen-space effect, it can only render what is visible on screen, screen-space reflections are not able to reflect off-screen objects or the back-sides of objects which are not visible to the camera.
toolbag2 should be using more complex reflection shaders than screen space.
Any suggestions on what sort of technique would be feasible in real time? Short of a ray-traced reflections (which is very unlikely), I'm not aware of any other methods we could do.
Any suggestions on what sort of technique would be feasible in real time? Short of a ray-traced reflections (which is very unlikely), I'm not aware of any other methods we could do.
Would it be possible to do ray traced reflections when you render something out? Run screen space reflections in the viewport, but for presentation purposes have the option to calculate ray-traced reflections on certain objects and/or materials. Something like that maybe.
Edit. The other option would be to be able to attach a camera to a reflective surface that captures whatever its pointing towards.
Replies
Just one last thing I noticed in Beta 4, the random seed and output size settings of substances are not displayed, would be great if they were.
I'm getting the same issues with shadows on my comp too ( GTx680).
yes! will be definitely getting this!
Little question for people in my situation : since license will be more convenient now, what happen for people who bought two licenses to have Toolbag on two computers in the past ? Do we have to forget one of them ?
but seriously though, cant wait to get my hands on this. and i'm glad, i get a discount for owning TB1
+1
Just going to quote my self in case you missed it
FYI, I just installed the new Toolbag 2.0b4 (Windows) on my HP EliteBook 8440p and had consecutive hard locks on launch that required a hard reboot of the system.
Systems Specs include:
HP EliteBook 8440p
Win 7 Service Pack 1
Intel Core i7 2.67 GHz
8.00 GB RAM
64 BIT OS
NVIDIA Quadro FX 380M
No, I caught it. Thanks! The crash on open bug we've got logged here, the sky visibility bug we've had reported but I've never been able to reproduce it, I see you're on a Mac though.
Is anyone else who is getting the sky vis crash bug on mac as well?
still broken in b4 though.
We will not be offering additional discounts for users who have multiple licenses, however, upgrades are tied to your unique invoice ID, so you could let a friend use your extra license to get the upgrade discount as well.
I use 64-bit windows 8.
windows 8 sucks!
may be that is the issue ?
I'm using it on a 560ti (I7) and a 765m (also I7) on Win7 pro on two machines and have yet to get the crash.
No crash here either, Win 7pro gtx 670
and a bug and some features request
Here are some bug reports, suggestions and ideas. Sorry in advance for the lengthy post !
And by the way : thank you for fixing the UI panel collapsing behavior for camera options, it feels great now
My specs are :
Win 7 Pro 64 Service pack 1
i7 920 @ 2.67GHz
24 gigs of RAM
GeForce GTX 460
I am breaking down the feedback as follows :
1 - Bugs and important missing features
These are the bugs that I frequently encounter at the time of b4. These are the problems or missing features that make the program feel "broken".
2 - Suggestions regarding major annoyances
These suggested changes and fixes would speed up the overall workflow when using Toolbag, as they would make important, often used actions much easier to perform and more intuitive. Think of it as the "teeth grinding" stuff that can be worked around but is rather annoying
3 - Suggestions regarding minor annoyances
These suggested changes and fixes wouldn't speed up the workflow that much, but would make it smoother and more intuitive, especially to newcomers. Some users might be more sensitive to these than others.
4 - Ideas for added features
These are possible additions that I think could benefit Toolbag. Most of them are related to current features, and some go further than a simple fix or change and introduce new ideas.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
1 - Bugs and important missing features
- The rotation "jumps" when typing-in angle values are still present (as highlighted in the earlier video).
- Need a distinction between object undo and camera undo (see Max)
- When Opening a scene in which some objects have previously been set as "hidden" before saving, all the objects are displayed, even if though they are correctly flagged as hidden in the outliner. I have to switch the eye icon on and off for these objects to actually disappear (as highlighted in the earlier video).
- Opening Toolbag and then browsing to open an existing file works fine ; however I am getting constant crashes when I try to open the program by double clicking any of my scene files. (still true with b4)
- The background skies are very low res - I understand that the overall lighting is derived from lower resolution sky maps, but shouldn't the background displayed in the viewport be at least 4k ?
- Not so much a bug but and more of an important missing feature : When saving using "save scene as",if the scene to be saved has been opened from an existing file, the "File name" dialog should already be filled with the name of the loaded file, so that the user can simply edit the name or increment it. See Photoshop.
- The top toolbar (where it says "Marmoset Toolbag 2.00b4 (pre-release) (64-bit)" ) should indicate the filename of the currently opened scene. The name should also display an appended " *" at the end of the name to indicate that a scene has been edited. (nameofthefile *). It's important in order to not overwrite important scenes by mistake.
- Let's say I have a specific camera that I like (all its settings are fine tuned, the DOF and FOV are just how I want them, and so on). If I want to create a slightly different variant of this camera, at the moment my only three choices are : editing this one camera destructively ; creating a new one from scratch and edit all its setting manually to match the original ; saving the scene to a new file just so that I can have the two camera saved. Instead, there should be an easy way to duplicate a camera, and/or a way to copy paste camera settings. (right-click options in outliner : duplicate camera ; delete camera ; select camera settings ; paste camera settings).
- There seems to be a bug related to sky visibility and reflections. When turning "Sky Background" off in the Render options, the overall tint is still there (as intended) but some intense hotspots in the reflections can disappear.
(ie the teeth grinding stuff
- Needs Q-W-E-R keys for select, move, rotate, scale of any scene element.
- Need square marquee selection of objects and lights in the viewport.
- Need shit-selection of multiple objects in the viewport (especially since the Outliner allows that already)
- Mousewheel zoom feels inverted compared to other 3D apps. Maybe add an option to invert this behavior if desired ?
- When manipulating hierarchies in the Outliner, I notice that the "Sky" and "Main Camera" items cannot be manipulated and rearranged, even though other objects can be re-arranged around them. That seems inconsistent, and prevents fast arrangement of Outliner items.
- There are cases when the outliner does not seem to outline anything. For instance, if an object is part of a parented and collapsed hierarchy, (therefore hidden from view in the depth of the expandable tree) it would be useful to have its parent highlighted in the list (with a different highlight color than the regular one) when the child object is selected by clicking it in the scene space. That way a maximum amount of information would be displayed at all times, without having to expand/explore hierarchies. This would instantly tell me if my objects are parented properly without having to fiddle with the outliner trees. (See Maya)
- Currently, selection in the Outliner only works when clicking right on the text name of the object. Selection should also work when clicking anywhere on the line representing the object. Especially since some users might actually have developed the habit of *not* clicking on the text name of object in tree hierarchies of other programs, in order to avoid accidental renaming.
- When a directional light is created, it appears in the 3D scene as an icon with an arrow (suggesting the directional nature of the light). However the arrow of that icon is pointing at an arbitrary angle. It would be nice if the icon could dynamically rotate, to indicate the direction that the light is actually pointing to. It might be best to simply not use an icon for the representation of such lights at all, and rather use a little 3D mesh instead.
- Same is true for Spot lights.
- Also, I would love to be able to switch the display of such light icons on and off at will for quick printscreens and for realtime review. Alt-spacebar could be used for that. This would also toggle off the grid if any, and all other scene indicators, but would keep the UI tabs visible.
- Need a world-based object manipulation feature (as opposed to local only currently)
- Need to be able to rotate objects and lights by grabbing the surface of a "control sphere". See Max.
- There needs to be a way to enable screen space object dragging at any time ("tweak mode"). Middle click-drag could work, from anywhere in the scene (no need to "touch" the object to drag it). See Maya.
- Is there currently a way to interactively scale an object up and down in the viewport ?
- The little "+" markers on material components panels should all expand into texture selection dialogs ; there should be no need for the user to specify that a texture slot should be created. I suppose this is related to shader optimization, but visually it looks strange to have "+" buttons expanding to nothing, as it feels like some feature is missing from the program. Maybe there could be an other way to specify if a certain channel is wanted ; and if not, the corresponding panel would simply not show up. This would then reduce visual clutter when editing material properties.
(ie things that some users might notice, while others might not)
- When Toolbag opens up with its default scene, the default active camera is a bit confusing. I think there are two factors contributing to this : first, the camera rotates around itself, like mouse look in an FPS, as opposed to orbiting around a given center of interest like a regular Max/Maya camera would. And second, the sky dome environment, being infinite, does not offer any visual point of reference allowing the user to know where he/she is in the space of the scene when panning and zooming. A floor grid and/or an origin indicator would help.
The above problem does not occur when seeing the scene through a user-created camera. I would suggest the default Main Camera to behave just like this.
All this combined would make Toolbag feel more familiar, especially when first opening it.
- It is not possible to click out of dropdown menus by clicking the application top bar. This is expected from regular Windows apps.
- Deleting an object from the outliner is possible with the delete key, but it should also be possible to do so with a right-click context menu. This menu would include : Copy, Paste, Duplicate, Delete, Hide selection, Unhide selection, Freeze selection, Unfreeze selection, Create new material.
- It would be nice for the little eye icons for visibility toggle to work like Photoshop when click-dragging over them.
- The Add Mesh menu item for model import item feels a bit misplaced and misnamed. I would naturally expect it to be found under File > Import. The "Add" menu could probably be called "Create" and include the existing lights types but also simple primitives. (basic primitives like cube, spheres, and so on can be very useful for setting up shadow casting elements and white boxes for occlusion or light bouncing). Of course if this is implemented, there needs to be an option to scale meshes up and down as desired.
- On a related note, I would love to be able to populate this menu with my own meshes, as this would be very useful for loading reference characters and scale references. See the Mudbox folder structure for this.
- A setting for objects to occlude the ambient light coming from the sky.
- I wish the legacy Toolbag 1 skies were included ! I miss the garage. And of course it would help when it comes to comparing renders between TB1 and 2.
- It might be beneficial to have the materials present in the scene actually show up as outliner items. This would allow for fast scene cleanup and organization, with the option to filter them out visually if the user would rather not see them there. See Mudbox.
This would also allow the user to apply a material to an object simply from by grabbing a material from the outliner and releasing it on the desired object - either in the scene or the outliner.
- Once finished, Render Turntable should open the Windows Explorer folder containing the generated files.
- Also, shouldn't "Capture Turntable" actually render a full smooth turnaround (in uncompressed avi, or as TGA image sequence with alpha, to be converted into a video later) as opposed to screenshots from just a few discrete angles ?
- Free-look FPS camera could be useful, especially for navigation in large environment scenes. But it might benefit from an alternative input scheme, different from the Maya scheme. Think of the camera controls in Unreal Editor.
- There might need an FPS "fly/walk mode" controlled with WASD (and the arrow keysfor lefties
- It would be nice if the user could manipulate the direction of non-point lights without having to actually grab them ; see the Mudbox input scheme for such off-hand manipulation (press down L and mouse-click-drag to control the direction of the last selected directional light). It makes a lot of sense for directional lights to work this way, as they do not really originate from a given point in space.
- Might need some simple snapping options for environment artists : Grab vertex and snap to grid ; grab object's axis and snap to grid ; grab object vertex and snap to other object vertex ; step rotate ; step move ; step scale ; align object to face.
- "Add > Mesh" could also create a new empty material and apply it to the newly imported model, as opposed to applying the "Default" one. And for clarity, the created material could be automatically named after the contents of the imported mesh. This material would have the same settings as "Default". That way, from there, all the user needs to do is to browser for the needed textures. Or delete the material if not needed.
- Might need a right-click dropdown context menu on material spheres. This menu would include : Create new material, Duplicate this material, Delete this material, Copy material settings, Paste material settings, Revert settings to default)
- Right-clicking the empty area in the Material Editor should bring up a context menu with : Create new material.
- Would be cool to have a few more material presets, using simple 128*128 tiling textures or even just plain RGB inputs : Cloth, Wet cloth, brick, Skin, Plaster, Wood From there the user would have a great reference to work from and tweak. There could also be a demo mesh for these with more proper UVs, like the Vray sphere. Maybe a penis tank ?
- It might be nice to be able to remap keys ; for instance, some users might like to have Frame bound to something else than ctrl-F (F for instance like in Toolbag1
- Need "Frame all" happening if the user hits the Frame key when no objects are selected.
- Is there any way to scale (= zoom out) the displayed sky ? I understand that it is a cheat and should better be performed by adjusting the FOV of the camera, but sometimes it might be useful for presentation purpose, to make an object appear smaller or bigger, and so on. See Keyshot.
- Right click could be used as a way to open a context menu, when right-clicking in the space of the scene. This menu could hold useful shortcuts for Copy selected, Pate Selected, Delete selected, Duplicate selected, Create new material, Create new material and assign to selected, Create light, and so on. See Max, Maya, Mudbox.
- On saving scene files : I wish there was a way to work with an optional project system, like in Max in Maya. While I actually like the fact that I can simply point Toolbag to texture files regardless of where they are located on my system, it can become a problem on complex large scene with multiple objects and textures. A simply "File>Create project folder" would let the user create an empty folder where wanted ; and "File>Point to project folder" would tell Toolbag that the indicated location should now be a default root location for scene files and textures (while still allowing to link to other locations, as normal). This would make projects easily portable, depending on relative paths as opposed to absolute paths.
"File>Use absolute paths" would revert the whole system (and the current scene paths) to absolute/default behavior.
- On a related note : I wish there was a way to "pack" any scene into a proper, portable project folder, regardless of messy texture links originally pointing to different absolute locations. To do that, Toolbag would fetch all the textures being used in the current materials of the scene, and move them to a new, user-defined project folder. This folder could then even be zipped, becoming a Toolbag-specific file format (see 3DSMax *.mzp, Winamp skins, and so on)
- Might need an option to lock the orientation of Directional Lights relatively to the camera angle (see Mudbox). And another option to lock them to the sky angle, making the sky "drag" the user lights along when shift-rotating it, consolidating the whole light components into a big lighting rig. Maybe this could be a per-light setting.
The skin shader is great and the light editor is crazy: here I'm using six directional lights generated from the evening construction environment, created just in a few seconds
- definitely needed scaling options for objects;
- directional lights need some visual feedback regarding their direction;
- I'd like to import and export shaders from one scene to one another; semtimes I spend quite a lot twaking a shader and would be cool to store it and use in different scenes, just like in TB1;
- I'd like to merge different TB scenes through an import/merge option: IE I can work on an environment and a character in different scenes and merge them when finished.
Hope this makes sense!
Any discount for Beta testers?
I've been playing with it a lot last night and I had those bugs I've never had before.
First all the new scenes I made would lose all of the material/maps everytime I reopen them, And sometimes even if I am applyting the texture back on it, it still look like metal and very weird and I actually have to rebuild my material from scratch. I have this bug too that when I ctrl z (undo) It lost all of my scene texture and once again, when applying them back it would still look like metal and I would have to rebuilt all my material from scratch,
Happened to me like at leat 5 times last night and I was not having those kind of issues before,
Is there a specific way to set it up to prevent it from hapenning? Is is because all of my texture are not in the same folder than my toolbag scene? I always worked like that in toolbag 1 without issue.
only happens when the camera is not too close to the mesh.
fyi, i scaled the mesh accordingly so that shouldn't be the problem.
I had the exact same thing yersterday! I wasn't sure if it was a bug or a graphic card issue
Yepp! Me too!
There's one thing I've noticed that sometimes happens when changing Tangent Space on a mesh or adding Fuzz to the assigned shader. It looks like there are clipping plane issues with the camera. It's more visible with Fuzz on since it's like a fresnel in a way which highlights the edges. However, it's still visible in some cases even if you don't change the Tangent Space.
I've attached an example. Maybe there should be a Near/Far clipping plane option on the camera? If this is what's causing these artifacts that is.
agreed, i was thinking the same thing since its visibility changed based on camera distance.
besides that, it would be good to have a shadow bias/tolerance setting for contact refinement so we can adjust the distance required to cast a close contact shadow.
Also i got a weird glitch (Im assuming it's a glitch) with reflections.
hey looked borked here:
but here with the mesh close to the glass, it looks better.
It looks like it could be the "Screen-space" in "Screen-space Reflections" doing you in. It can only reflect what's already rendered on screen, I believe.
Joopson- Where is screen space reflection settings?
Oh, I'm sorry, I don't mean that there is a setting you can change, just that this is how SSR works. It reflects what's on screen. I'm unsure if there's a way to fix the problem in Marmoset 2; in fact, I've not used it. I'm assuming this is the problem though, because the majority of what would be reflected is not in view.
Here's an image showing some limitations of SSR, from CryEngine. The images are by Thomy over at CryDev.
toolbag2 should be using more complex reflection shaders than screen space.
@Almighty-Gir- I could have missed something but we haven't got a glass shader yet in TB2, right? Hopefully the one they are working on will melt my socks.
Yes, unfortunately this is simply a limitation of the screen-space reflection technique. As its a screen-space effect, it can only render what is visible on screen, screen-space reflections are not able to reflect off-screen objects or the back-sides of objects which are not visible to the camera.
Any suggestions on what sort of technique would be feasible in real time? Short of a ray-traced reflections (which is very unlikely), I'm not aware of any other methods we could do.
Would it be possible to do ray traced reflections when you render something out? Run screen space reflections in the viewport, but for presentation purposes have the option to calculate ray-traced reflections on certain objects and/or materials. Something like that maybe.
Edit. The other option would be to be able to attach a camera to a reflective surface that captures whatever its pointing towards.