Very nice program! Think I found a couple of bugs; when holding down the middle mouse button + moving the mouse in any direction the focus distance changes randomly.
The middle mouse button auto focuses on the point where the mouse cursor is.
I can't reproduce holding it down though, it only re-focuses on the initial button press for me. What hardware/os do you have?
I have set the default tangent space to 3D Studio Max in the preferences but it does not seem to remember the setting even though it says so. So I have to change all the meshes manually after import.
Thanks, I'll get this one logged.
Some feature suggestions:
- Change the rotation/move gizmo from local to world.
- Scale meshes
- Refresh mesh button
And I would also like to see chromatic aberration
These are all on the todo list.
and distance/height fog, thanks!
This is something we may add later if there is enough interest. Thanks for the feedback!
Refraction is not in yet, and we do not have an ETA on when it will be in, but we are planing to include it in a future release. Refraction will likely not work very will in terms for sorting (as it has to be rendered after everything else) so if you have a complex situation where you need need overlapping glass planes (car windows or something) the refraction shader will probably not be the solution.
Additive specular blending is your best bet for glass currently, and it works rather well for simple, clear glass.
instead of real refraction, would it be possible to add some sort of fake pixel distortion based on normal map with a setting to increase/decrease distortion and ability to blur what ever is seen through that surface?
realtime blurring is already happening with DOF, this would be masked blurring seen through a material.
instead of real refraction, would it be possible to add some sort of fake pixel distortion based on normal map with a setting to increase/decrease distortion and ability to blur what ever is seen through that surface?
realtime blurring is already happening with DOF, this would be masked blurring seen through a material.
This would likely have the same problems that the refraction shader is going to have, the problem is a shader like this that needs to distort/alter content after the whole frame is drawn, which means it is very difficult/impossible to render these effects as overlapping elements.
This is my understanding of it anyway, I could be wrong. I can ask Jeff when he gets back from vacation but I have a feeling the answer will be similar to what I've written above.
On a related note, DOF does not work with add blending unfortunately, and this also may be extremely hard or impossible to fix for similar reasons (its difficult to draw additive blended elements into the depth buffer).
Hi EarthQuake, another feature request. Could we get the ability to turn off emit specular on a per light basis. I can't quite get the result I'm after when shadow casting is turned on to occlude the spec appearing where I don't want it. Really enjoying working with Marmoset so far, love the material system.
For the refraction I'm just looking for whatever technique is commonly used in games. I'm not sure how it works, but I've had the feature in many couple engines I've worked in now.
Feature request. Could I get an option to capture from a specific camera, right now I'm framing my shot in one camera, but want to do work in another camera then hit f10 to capture from my framed render cam.
Hi EQ, here is my first completed project in Marmoset 2 cross post from the main forum, but I thought it would make sense to post here too. Extremely fun to work with the tool. I ended up doing my post process offline though as I found the current post process in Marmoset to be limited. Feature requests based on my workflow below.
Feature requests for post process:
1. Chromatic aberration, choice of red/blue or green/purple like Photoshop.
2. Bloom renders corrupted when trying to set the values to anything higher than a very small number.
3. Bloom needs brightness/contrast control.
4. Can we have a toggle for screen space noise to use coloured noise like Photoshop.
5. I find it impossible to tune vignette because my output frame is 16x9, but while I'm tuning the viewport is closer to square, flipping back and forth using the space bar is painful. I need that safe feature where the viewport is scaled to the correct aspect ratio, or have a tear off so the menus can be made floating on a second monitor, or have a button to render a second viewport at the correct aspect ratio on the second monitor.
But now that I think about it, I'm quite happy to do post process in Photoshop currently, but the things I can't do in Photoshop are light cones/god rays, depth fog, lens flares, and HDR bloom so those would be higher on my list of features requests.
Another request, I often find the gizmo gets in the way, to get the viewport in focus I find I have to left click in the viewport, this selects something, then I need to click the scene node in the outliner to deselect it. Could you make the ESC key deselect all just like clicking the scene root in the out liner.
Hi everyone, this isn't technically an issue with marmoset 2 (which i'm loving so far btw), however it does relate directly to it's wonderful ability to allow us to create more physically accurate, reflective metals and since many people seem to be experimenting with this, I thought this the best place to post this question:
Is anyone able to create a perfectly flat, mirrored surface that uses a normal map that doesn't contain artefacts or blemishes? I have attached a set of annotated images to illustrate my problem when doing so, I feel like I'm missing something very obvious here:
Thanks for your responses guys, almighty_gir you're right, I checked the bit depth and it was set to 8bit, however I've tried baking out a 16bit .TIF from xnormal as well as dividing the mesh but to no avail...
Is there another way of getting a 16 bit normal map out of xnormal/is a .TIF the right way to go?
Bake a 16bit normal map and/or lessen the gradients in the NM by using extra geo / hard edges.
i thought it was the opposite of that, more gradients will give you less banding issues in real time preview ...
less gradients is less color variation and very subtle color changes in the normal map causing the banding issues in the first place. it is a very common misconception that gradients in normal map are bad.
so may be use one smoothing group with no hard edges and triangulated mesh.
here is a test with 8bit 1k normal map. also tried 16bit and no substantial visible difference.
less gradients is less color variation and very subtle color changes in the normal map causing the banding issues in the first place. it is a very common misconception that gradients in normal map are bad.
Did a quick test, and for me (.tga straight out of max) the 1 smoothing group version is a lot worse.
Left is every face another smoothing group, right is one smoothing group.
@ joeriv - i stand corrected, can you possibly share your source files(mesh, texture, toolbag scene) please ? would love to check it out.
btw, the mesh on left seems to be getting some dot like artifacts. may be change the sampling in Max ...
*edit* nvm my last post, smoothing groups seem to give perfect flat surface with zero artifacts (tga straight out of maya)
left is hard edges on each 90 degree edges UV splits. right is one smoothing group no UV splits. it seems for such flat surface UV splits and hard edges are the way to go :thumbup:
Haha, welcome to the dark side MM. Yeah, pretty much any time you can minimize the gradiations in your normal map, you'll minimize smoothing errors, even with a totally synced normal map pipeline. When you throw texture compression into the mix its even worse. Basically what is covered in this thread: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=107196
There is some truth to your initial sentiment though, which was never covered in that thread, but its a really specific situation. Basically when your lowpoly geometry is so close in detail to your highpoly, that the gradiations become super fine and subtle, then it really helps to have a higher bit-depth image. This is common with super-dense car meshes and things like that, and why often those sort of assets skip normal maps and control the shading with the mesh itself.
Re: Smoothing errors generally looking worse in Toolbag vs Max/Maya. This isn't really a Toolbag specific thing, the issue you're seeing here is comparing simple, basic blinn or whatever shaders to shaders that use image based lighting. Any time you use image based lighting or cube map reflections, these minor errors are going to be more obvious.
There are basically two ways to deal with gradients in a 8-bit image, first one is stair-stepping type artifacts, and the second is dithering which adds noise. I know max dithers, and earlier version of maya did the stair stepping thing. Using a higher-bit depth image should improve this sort of issues.
The more detailed the image based lighting/reflections are, the more obvious minor normal map errors will be as well. So it makes sense that high gloss surfaces show the effect more clearly. What happens is that there is simply more resolution, and thus more contrast to the IBL lighting content, so even with minor surface variation from dithering, thats more possible colors/pixels in the IBL to sample, which causes the artifacts to be more apparent. With less glossy surfaces the IBL content is blured, so the reflections will tend to look more even.
Found an issue, not sure if it has been brought up in this thread or another, but...
Bug: Single-sided polygons do not cast shadows
To reproduce the issue, import a single sided polygon into Toolbag 2. Here is an example from my scene:
I thought of a fix, but this causes another issue which to me won't worl for my final image. Take the geometry, duplicate it, and then flip the normals. Seems smart, right? Unfortunately it makes the geometry darker (it does cast the correct shadows at least though)
i thought it was the opposite of that, more gradients will give you less banding issues in real time preview ...
Joeriv and Earthquake already answered this, but consider compression, which will almost certainly be applied to the textures we see in-engine. The more gradients, the more noticeable the compression will be. I'm guessing you thought more gradients = less banding because in this specific case (a cube with smooth normals) the gradients are required to make the smoothed lowpoly appear flat, when really what you should do is set hard edges by UV seams as you did in your newer post (because those verts are already split so adding an extra normal or two doesn't add to the real vert count). Alternatively you could add supporting edges and have more continuous UV islands to minimise seams / make texturing easier.
@ MM, Joeriv, Bek and Earthquake - thanks guys for helping to troubleshoot the compression issues I was experiencing and for your source files and additional links - all of which i'll be taking a look at today Really appreciate all of your input!
Creating seperate uv islands/hard edges around areas on models that I would like to have very clear reflections is certainly a very useful tip, also nice to know that 16bit normal maps aren't always neccessarily essential in these cases.
Basically, most textures would require sRGB correction, since that's the gamut mostly used. To tell whether to use it or not, see if your texture comes out brighter and less contrasted than normal. Don't use it for normal maps though, it royally screws them up.
Ok, so I just bought toolbag 2, I don't really know much about advanced rendering and shaders. Do I need to do anything different with albedo and roughness maps than you would do with diffuse and gloss maps to get best results? Any resources I should look at?
Hey guys so there is something I'd like to question. We have been using the physically based workflow at work for quite some time now, for the metalness map I would normally make it white where I want it to be metal and black where I want it to be anything but metal. I did this in Marmoset and the parts where the metalness map is pure black I no longer receive any diffuse lighting and therefore also don't receive shadows. Is this correct? This doesn't really make sense to me because I'm looking at a can of redbull in real life right now and the metal is highly reflective, but also receives shadows. I had assumed the metalness map was a mask for which parts of the texture should receive coloured specular and also push the diffuse component closer to black. Am I missing something?
Or are we saying because metalness at 100% is effectively a mirror and only reflects specular light that this is in fact correct, if that is the case do we just tune this by eye then? Can you cast shadows on to a mirror, I'd need to take a look.
Hey guys so there is something I'd like to question. We have been using the physically based workflow at work for quite some time now, for the metalness map I would normally make it white where I want it to be metal and black where I want it to be anything but metal. I did this in Marmoset and the parts where the metalness map is pure black I no longer receive any diffuse lighting and therefore also don't receive shadows. Is this correct? This doesn't really make sense to me because I'm looking at a can of redbull in real life right now and the metal is highly reflective, but also receives shadows. I had assumed the metalness map was a mask for which parts of the texture should receive coloured specular and also push the diffuse component closer to black. Am I missing something?
Or are we saying because metalness at 100% is effectively a mirror and only reflects specular light that this is in fact correct, if that is the case do we just tune this by eye then? Can you cast shadows on to a mirror, I'd need to take a look.
Interesting question, this is something I've gone back and forth with our programmers about many times. Previously in Toolbag 1 specular relfections were shadowed, but from everything I understand, that just isn't a physically accurate representation of proper lighting, so it was dropped for TB2.
With a fully metalic material, the object has zero diffuse contribution. Shadows affect diffuse lighting and specular highlights from dynamic lights are blocked/shadowed.
Ambient specular reflections are not affected by shadows though. SSR helps, but we probably need some sort of occlusion/radiosity solution for it to really come together.
Fully reflective surfaces do not receive shadows so much as they simply reflect the object that is in front of the light source, which SSR should simulate, but SSR has limitations of course.
When you shadow specular reflections, what you're really doing is making the object less reflective when its in shadow, which isn't really how it works. Again, from my understanding of the whole thing (I could be wrong on some points here).
I would be really curious to know how your system at work behaves if it differs drastically to what you're seeing in TB.
Cool sounds correct, I did some tests with a flashlight on multiple reflective surfaces to see if they would receive shadow, looks like mirrors don't receive shadows which makes sense to me as all the light is reflected back without any diffusion. I did notice some shadowing, but I believe this was due to the dust that had collected on the mirror, once I wiped it away the shadow disappeared.
And given in the DGS model that we have all been using for so long to make glass or a mirror you would make the diffuse black so it would not receive any lighting only reflect specular hot spots and environment map reflections so this does make sense that a 100% metalness area of the texture would actually tint the diffuse pure black behind the scenes and you would not get any shadows/diffuse lighting. I'm not back at work until next week I'll do some tests and let you know how we're doing it.
For those working with metalness maps if you want to make chrome/mirror you have to make your diffuse pure white, and the metalness map 100%.
EQ, I did notice one thing not sure if this is a bug or not, when I put a pure white texture into the metalness map and moved the colour value to 0.8 it came back as a different value in the viewport when setting the colour value to 1.0 and setting the texture brightness in the source art to 80%. I would have thought these should be the same? If I set my texture brightness to 90% then it's exactly the same as a constant of 0.8, can you test this on your end and let me know what you see, are you guys compressing the textures before they are loaded into TB2?
I have a question too about the metalness workflow.
When I'm using a metalness texture, it totally wash out the colors of my albedo and I don't understand why (see attached image).
I put my mask texture with two colors : black for non-metal and white for metal. On this mesh the metal part is the attach on the cloth in the middle. What I don't understand is why removing the texture fix the problem.
All my textures are in sRGB exported from Substance Designer 4.0.0.
@ Foryok - When something is 100% metal Marmoset darkens the diffuse to help out. So when you see the diffuse dark on the left its because you have everything as a metal. The image on the right the washed out feeling is caused by the fact that your gloss is 0 so your spec is completely spread out on the surface. Or at least that's what it looks like to me.
@ Foryok - When something is 100% metal Marmoset darkens the diffuse to help out. So when you see the diffuse dark on the left its because you have everything as a metal.
I don't think that's the case, because the left image match the colors I have in my texture app. So I believe the colors are correct.
The image on the right the washed out feeling is caused by the fact that your gloss is 0 so your spec is completely spread out on the surface. Or at least that's what it looks like to me.
Hmmm, but I'm in front of the mesh, so I soudn'ls get specular reflection with that angle, right ? Beside, with a gloss at 0 it should reduce spread the specular reflection and therefore reduce the amount of direct lighting, no ?
I will try some comparisons in an other software then...
@ Foryok - When something is 100% metal Marmoset darkens the diffuse to help out. So when you see the diffuse dark on the left its because you have everything as a metal. The image on the right the washed out feeling is caused by the fact that your gloss is 0 so your spec is completely spread out on the surface. Or at least that's what it looks like to me.
Yes this is pretty much it.
The metalness shader model does a couple things:
1. Where metalness is 1 (white in the texture) it makes the diffuse black, and pulls the specular reflection intensity/color from the albedo map
2. Where metalness is 0 (black), it assigns a base reflectivity of about 0.04 (or something, I don't remember the exact value).
Why your result looks wasted out is your specular intensity is 0.04 there, but the gloss is zero, which means the specular highlight is extremely blurred and diffused, clear that gloss map and you should see.
For the refraction I'm just looking for whatever technique is commonly used in games. I'm not sure how it works, but I've had the feature in many couple engines I've worked in now.
Sure, were going to have refraction in at some point. I just wanted to temper expectations, refraction will not be order-independent, so it will have sorting issues as is common in games. Again doing multiple layers of refraction may be difficult to get right.
Hi EarthQuake, another feature request. Could we get the ability to turn off emit specular on a per light basis. I can't quite get the result I'm after when shadow casting is turned on to occlude the spec appearing where I don't want it. Really enjoying working with Marmoset so far, love the material system.
Feature request. Could I get an option to capture from a specific camera, right now I'm framing my shot in one camera, but want to do work in another camera then hit f10 to capture from my framed render cam.
1. Chromatic aberration, choice of red/blue or green/purple like Photoshop. 3. Bloom needs brightness/contrast control. 4. Can we have a toggle for screen space noise to use coloured noise like Photoshop.
Thanks again for the suggestions.
5. I find it impossible to tune vignette because my output frame is 16x9, but while I'm tuning the viewport is closer to square, flipping back and forth using the space bar is painful. I need that safe feature where the viewport is scaled to the correct aspect ratio, or have a tear off so the menus can be made floating on a second monitor, or have a button to render a second viewport at the correct aspect ratio on the second monitor.
Yeah we need to solve this with some sort of safe-frame system.
But now that I think about it, I'm quite happy to do post process in Photoshop currently, but the things I can't do in Photoshop are light cones/god rays, depth fog, lens flares, and HDR bloom so those would be higher on my list of features requests.
Ill add these to the suggestion list as well.
2. Bloom renders corrupted when trying to set the values to anything higher than a very small number.
I cant really repro this, bloom seems fine (other than blowing highlights) up to a value of 10 here for me. Screenshots?
Another request, I often find the gizmo gets in the way, to get the viewport in focus I find I have to left click in the viewport, this selects something, then I need to click the scene node in the outliner to deselect it. Could you make the ESC key deselect all just like clicking the scene root in the out liner.
Clicking any blank space in the viewport should drop selection/deselect all, though Ill add a hotkey for that to the suggestion list too. Oh also, nice cookies. =D
Found an issue, not sure if it has been brought up in this thread or another, but... Bug: Single-sided polygons do not cast shadows To reproduce the issue, import a single sided polygon into Toolbag 2. Here is an example from my scene: I thought of a fix, but this causes another issue which to me won't worl for my final image. Take the geometry, duplicate it, and then flip the normals. Seems smart, right? Unfortunately it makes the geometry darker (it does cast the correct shadows at least though) Here's a gif showing I mean: Hopefully this can be fixed for the next update
This is a known issue, but unfortunately I can not give an ETA on when a fix will be possible. Its a more difficult issue than it may appear from a technical perspective.
what does sRGB do and when do i want it turned on? Reed
sRGB means that your texture will be read as gamma space, if you authoried it in gamma space you want this on. If you authored it in linear space, you want it off. Normal maps are always linear space, so it defaults to off Diffuse/Albedo maps are usually gamma space, so sRGB defaults to on. Specular maps are usually game space, so sRGB defaults to on. Gloss maps can be either really, but we default to linear space/sRGB off. Height/displacement maps are usually linear too. If youre not really sure what this means, just leave everything set to default. If youre working with content create for another game engine, talk to your graphics programmers/technical artists to figure out which color space to use.
Here's a speed sculpt I did to test out how to render highpoly meshes in Marmoset. It works VERY VERY well. I think that Marmoset has a real shot at stealing some of Keyshot's market if you guys keep working on it with that aspect in the back of your head. Can't wait for the next update
Creating seperate uv islands/hard edges around areas on models that I would like to have very clear reflections is certainly a very useful tip, also nice to know that 16bit normal maps aren't always neccessarily essential in these cases.
Ok, so I just bought toolbag 2, I don't really know much about advanced rendering and shaders. Do I need to do anything different with albedo and roughness maps than you would do with diffuse and gloss maps to get best results? Any resources I should look at?
For albedo you generally should remove all baked lighting, including AO. You can add AO in with an extra map in the occlusione module. Gloss and roughness are the same thing, the only thing that differs really is the scale, some engines use black = glossy and others use white = glossy, TB2 by default is white = glossy but there is an invert tick there to support either style. Im writing something to explain this stuff a bit better, but not sure when it will be done.
So, big user of Substance here, I can only output textures in sRGB space with this software.
My current problem with that, is that if I invert my roughness in Substance to match the gloss map of Toolbag, or that I keep my texture as-is and I use the invert checkbox in toolbag, I don't get the same result. That's a bit problematic therefore for testing in my other app.
The "sRGB" option is enabled for my roughness texture, so I was wondering if the "invert" function does take the gamma space into account when inverting the texture ?
Hi EQ, I have a skybox in my cookies scene so I can't click into empty space which is why I asked for ESC to be deselect all, I think it is the same key in unreal.
Here is my bloom bug I'm having, I typically like to tune bloom very broad and extremely soft, I haven't seen this issue in other engines. Haven't really debugged this, but it looks like it's coming from the very hot specular reflections from point lights. I'm happy to share the scene if you can't recreate it on your end.
Feature request. It would be awesome to have a texture size display slider like in Unity. I can load in a 4k map, but then easily check what it looks like on the lower resolutions without having to resize and save over and over.
Did someone figure out a workaround to render out a turntable without the sky tool snapping back to 0 rotation? It seems in certain numbers it works. but in general it always snaps back to 0 and 180 rotation.
I was thinking about a workaround in adjusting the HDRI so 0 is what the light should be (whatever would do the job). But I couldn't export the HDRI as a picture file out of Marmoset.
Also sometimes it works to export your sky and import it back. but it just works randomly. Couldn't figure out what's the pattern.
Ohhhh boy. Just grabbed toolbag2 tonight and threw in some million poly objects to see how it handles them. Very nice. Can't wait to use this puppy with a full baked out and texture model.
How do I use an alpha/transparency map in TB2? I've looked around all over in the menus but haven't found anywhere that I can load such a map and there are no tooltips or tutorials that have mentioned them either.
Hi guys I just did a model rendered in Toolbag 2. I just want to confirm something regarding Glossmaps generated by Ddo2. So when Ddo2 generated a Glossmap and put it on Toolbag2 Shader you have to reverse it, right? Because when I put it on Toolbag2's default glossmap settings (invert unchecked), it didn't look good, so I invert it and it looks fine (at least eye-ball wise). So is that the case, Ddo2 generated Glossmap should be inverted in Toolbag2 to look correct? Thanks and keep up the awesome!
With a material selected, scroll down to the Transparency menu (below occlusion/emissive).
Yeah, I had found that already, just not where you could load a texture. No matter though as I managed get the effect I wanted with the 'Add' shader after turning off spec for it.
My current problem with that, is that if I invert my roughness in Substance to match the gloss map of Toolbag, or that I keep my texture as-is and I use the invert checkbox in toolbag, I don't get the same result. That's a bit problematic therefore for testing in my other app.
The "sRGB" option is enabled for my roughness texture, so I was wondering if the "invert" function does take the gamma space into account when inverting the texture ?
We have a variety of things we need to tweak for better substance support and well look into what we can do here, it may be a limitation of Substance though.
Hi EQ, I have a skybox in my cookies scene so I can't click into empty space which is why I asked for ESC to be deselect all, I think it is the same key in unreal.
Ok that makes sense. Any specific reason youre loading in your own cube map mesh, instead of loading the background image into the sky lighting system?
Here is my bloom bug I'm having, I typically like to tune bloom very broad and extremely soft, I haven't seen this issue in other engines. Haven't really debugged this, but it looks like it's coming from the very hot specular reflections from point lights. I'm happy to share the scene if you can't recreate it on your end.
I asked about this and unfortunately its a limitation with the bloom technique. It should look better in output screenshots than it does in the viewport, and probably better yet if you output at double res and size down. Try that out and let me know if it helps.
Feature request. It would be awesome to have a texture size display slider like in Unity. I can load in a 4k map, but then easily check what it looks like on the lower resolutions without having to resize and save over and over.
Thats an interesting idea, Ill add it to the suggestion list, thanks.
Did someone figure out a workaround to render out a turntable without the sky tool snapping back to 0 rotation? It seems in certain numbers it works. but in general it always snaps back to 0 and 180 rotation.
I was thinking about a workaround in adjusting the HDRI so 0 is what the light should be (whatever would do the job). But I couldn't export the HDRI as a picture file out of Marmoset.
Also sometimes it works to export your sky and import it back. but it just works randomly. Couldn't figure out what's the pattern.
Sorry, this is a known issue and something that we will have to fix with a future update.
The only work around I am aware of is to pre-offset your sky the amount that it gets changed, I think a user posted this and had some success.
How do I use an alpha/transparency map in TB2? I've looked around all over in the menus but haven't found anywhere that I can load such a map and there are no tooltips or tutorials that have mentioned them either.
Add a transparancy method in the transparancy module of the shader editor, its near the bottom. Alpha is pulled from the albedo/diffuse alpha channel.
To use transparency, select a transparency model from the Transparency module. Toolbag current supports three types of transparency:
Cutout: Basic alphatest transparency.
Dithered: Soft, dithered blending, great for hair. Dithered renders out smooth but may look noisy in viewport.
Add: Additive blending, good for simple glassy surfaces, wet shells over eyeballs, etc. By default additive blending only takes the specular reflections into account. Diffuse can be used as well, however this will cause the diffuse content to glow, which works well for certain effects like reticles on red dot scopes.
Marmoset 2 is a joy to work with and I really like where it is headed with the new scene assembly features (move, rotate, scale, duplicate, group meshes etc).
Just curious are there any early whispers/plans for the environment art features to be expanded? For example a functional grid, vertex painting/material blending etc.
Marmoset trumps all other engines for ease-of-use and visual quality but it is missing certain features that would make it a viable alternative to UDK/Cryengine/Unity for non-playable environment art presentation.
In the top left of the viewport it will say the name of the camera you're currently viewing; click that for a dropdown of all cameras to switch between.
Replies
The middle mouse button auto focuses on the point where the mouse cursor is.
I can't reproduce holding it down though, it only re-focuses on the initial button press for me. What hardware/os do you have?
Thanks, I'll get this one logged.
These are all on the todo list.
This is something we may add later if there is enough interest. Thanks for the feedback!
instead of real refraction, would it be possible to add some sort of fake pixel distortion based on normal map with a setting to increase/decrease distortion and ability to blur what ever is seen through that surface?
realtime blurring is already happening with DOF, this would be masked blurring seen through a material.
This would likely have the same problems that the refraction shader is going to have, the problem is a shader like this that needs to distort/alter content after the whole frame is drawn, which means it is very difficult/impossible to render these effects as overlapping elements.
This is my understanding of it anyway, I could be wrong. I can ask Jeff when he gets back from vacation but I have a feeling the answer will be similar to what I've written above.
On a related note, DOF does not work with add blending unfortunately, and this also may be extremely hard or impossible to fix for similar reasons (its difficult to draw additive blended elements into the depth buffer).
This is from my project old_restroom.
Enjoy
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1979266#post1979266
1. Chromatic aberration, choice of red/blue or green/purple like Photoshop.
2. Bloom renders corrupted when trying to set the values to anything higher than a very small number.
3. Bloom needs brightness/contrast control.
4. Can we have a toggle for screen space noise to use coloured noise like Photoshop.
5. I find it impossible to tune vignette because my output frame is 16x9, but while I'm tuning the viewport is closer to square, flipping back and forth using the space bar is painful. I need that safe feature where the viewport is scaled to the correct aspect ratio, or have a tear off so the menus can be made floating on a second monitor, or have a button to render a second viewport at the correct aspect ratio on the second monitor.
But now that I think about it, I'm quite happy to do post process in Photoshop currently, but the things I can't do in Photoshop are light cones/god rays, depth fog, lens flares, and HDR bloom so those would be higher on my list of features requests.
Is anyone able to create a perfectly flat, mirrored surface that uses a normal map that doesn't contain artefacts or blemishes? I have attached a set of annotated images to illustrate my problem when doing so, I feel like I'm missing something very obvious here:
essentially - any compression or loss of accuracy in the normalmap will create artifacts like this.
Is there another way of getting a 16 bit normal map out of xnormal/is a .TIF the right way to go?
i thought it was the opposite of that, more gradients will give you less banding issues in real time preview ...
less gradients is less color variation and very subtle color changes in the normal map causing the banding issues in the first place. it is a very common misconception that gradients in normal map are bad.
so may be use one smoothing group with no hard edges and triangulated mesh.
here is a test with 8bit 1k normal map. also tried 16bit and no substantial visible difference.
download source files here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13288045/flat_test.rar
this is rendered at 2:1 and what little artifacts are seen i think are limitations of SSR. other than that the surface renders pretty flat.
Did a quick test, and for me (.tga straight out of max) the 1 smoothing group version is a lot worse.
Left is every face another smoothing group, right is one smoothing group.
btw, the mesh on left seems to be getting some dot like artifacts. may be change the sampling in Max ...
*edit* nvm my last post, smoothing groups seem to give perfect flat surface with zero artifacts (tga straight out of maya)
left is hard edges on each 90 degree edges UV splits. right is one smoothing group no UV splits. it seems for such flat surface UV splits and hard edges are the way to go :thumbup:
test files:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13288045/flat_test2.rar
There is some truth to your initial sentiment though, which was never covered in that thread, but its a really specific situation. Basically when your lowpoly geometry is so close in detail to your highpoly, that the gradiations become super fine and subtle, then it really helps to have a higher bit-depth image. This is common with super-dense car meshes and things like that, and why often those sort of assets skip normal maps and control the shading with the mesh itself.
Re: Smoothing errors generally looking worse in Toolbag vs Max/Maya. This isn't really a Toolbag specific thing, the issue you're seeing here is comparing simple, basic blinn or whatever shaders to shaders that use image based lighting. Any time you use image based lighting or cube map reflections, these minor errors are going to be more obvious.
There are basically two ways to deal with gradients in a 8-bit image, first one is stair-stepping type artifacts, and the second is dithering which adds noise. I know max dithers, and earlier version of maya did the stair stepping thing. Using a higher-bit depth image should improve this sort of issues.
The more detailed the image based lighting/reflections are, the more obvious minor normal map errors will be as well. So it makes sense that high gloss surfaces show the effect more clearly. What happens is that there is simply more resolution, and thus more contrast to the IBL lighting content, so even with minor surface variation from dithering, thats more possible colors/pixels in the IBL to sample, which causes the artifacts to be more apparent. With less glossy surfaces the IBL content is blured, so the reflections will tend to look more even.
Bug: Single-sided polygons do not cast shadows
To reproduce the issue, import a single sided polygon into Toolbag 2. Here is an example from my scene:
I thought of a fix, but this causes another issue which to me won't worl for my final image. Take the geometry, duplicate it, and then flip the normals. Seems smart, right? Unfortunately it makes the geometry darker (it does cast the correct shadows at least though)
Here's a gif showing I mean:
Hopefully this can be fixed for the next update
Reed
I think that Marmoset has a real shot at stealing some of Keyshot's market if you guys keep working on it with that aspect in the back of your head.
Can't wait for the next update
Creating seperate uv islands/hard edges around areas on models that I would like to have very clear reflections is certainly a very useful tip, also nice to know that 16bit normal maps aren't always neccessarily essential in these cases.
Let the eye candy posts recommence!
Basically, most textures would require sRGB correction, since that's the gamut mostly used. To tell whether to use it or not, see if your texture comes out brighter and less contrasted than normal. Don't use it for normal maps though, it royally screws them up.
Or are we saying because metalness at 100% is effectively a mirror and only reflects specular light that this is in fact correct, if that is the case do we just tune this by eye then? Can you cast shadows on to a mirror, I'd need to take a look.
Interesting question, this is something I've gone back and forth with our programmers about many times. Previously in Toolbag 1 specular relfections were shadowed, but from everything I understand, that just isn't a physically accurate representation of proper lighting, so it was dropped for TB2.
With a fully metalic material, the object has zero diffuse contribution. Shadows affect diffuse lighting and specular highlights from dynamic lights are blocked/shadowed.
Ambient specular reflections are not affected by shadows though. SSR helps, but we probably need some sort of occlusion/radiosity solution for it to really come together.
Fully reflective surfaces do not receive shadows so much as they simply reflect the object that is in front of the light source, which SSR should simulate, but SSR has limitations of course.
When you shadow specular reflections, what you're really doing is making the object less reflective when its in shadow, which isn't really how it works. Again, from my understanding of the whole thing (I could be wrong on some points here).
I would be really curious to know how your system at work behaves if it differs drastically to what you're seeing in TB.
And given in the DGS model that we have all been using for so long to make glass or a mirror you would make the diffuse black so it would not receive any lighting only reflect specular hot spots and environment map reflections so this does make sense that a 100% metalness area of the texture would actually tint the diffuse pure black behind the scenes and you would not get any shadows/diffuse lighting. I'm not back at work until next week I'll do some tests and let you know how we're doing it.
For those working with metalness maps if you want to make chrome/mirror you have to make your diffuse pure white, and the metalness map 100%.
EQ, I did notice one thing not sure if this is a bug or not, when I put a pure white texture into the metalness map and moved the colour value to 0.8 it came back as a different value in the viewport when setting the colour value to 1.0 and setting the texture brightness in the source art to 80%. I would have thought these should be the same? If I set my texture brightness to 90% then it's exactly the same as a constant of 0.8, can you test this on your end and let me know what you see, are you guys compressing the textures before they are loaded into TB2?
When I'm using a metalness texture, it totally wash out the colors of my albedo and I don't understand why (see attached image).
I put my mask texture with two colors : black for non-metal and white for metal. On this mesh the metal part is the attach on the cloth in the middle. What I don't understand is why removing the texture fix the problem.
All my textures are in sRGB exported from Substance Designer 4.0.0.
Hmmm, but I'm in front of the mesh, so I soudn'ls get specular reflection with that angle, right ? Beside, with a gloss at 0 it should reduce spread the specular reflection and therefore reduce the amount of direct lighting, no ?
I will try some comparisons in an other software then...
Yes this is pretty much it.
The metalness shader model does a couple things:
1. Where metalness is 1 (white in the texture) it makes the diffuse black, and pulls the specular reflection intensity/color from the albedo map
2. Where metalness is 0 (black), it assigns a base reflectivity of about 0.04 (or something, I don't remember the exact value).
Why your result looks wasted out is your specular intensity is 0.04 there, but the gloss is zero, which means the specular highlight is extremely blurred and diffused, clear that gloss map and you should see.
Very few materials in reality have a gloss of 0.
Sure, were going to have refraction in at some point. I just wanted to temper expectations, refraction will not be order-independent, so it will have sorting issues as is common in games. Again doing multiple layers of refraction may be difficult to get right.
Thanks again for the suggestions.
Yeah we need to solve this with some sort of safe-frame system.
Ill add these to the suggestion list as well.
I cant really repro this, bloom seems fine (other than blowing highlights) up to a value of 10 here for me. Screenshots?
Clicking any blank space in the viewport should drop selection/deselect all, though Ill add a hotkey for that to the suggestion list too.
Oh also, nice cookies. =D
Sorry, not currently, this is something that we might add in a future release.
This is a known issue, but unfortunately I can not give an ETA on when a fix will be possible. Its a more difficult issue than it may appear from a technical perspective.
sRGB means that your texture will be read as gamma space, if you authoried it in gamma space you want this on. If you authored it in linear space, you want it off.
Normal maps are always linear space, so it defaults to off
Diffuse/Albedo maps are usually gamma space, so sRGB defaults to on.
Specular maps are usually game space, so sRGB defaults to on.
Gloss maps can be either really, but we default to linear space/sRGB off.
Height/displacement maps are usually linear too.
If youre not really sure what this means, just leave everything set to default. If youre working with content create for another game engine, talk to your graphics programmers/technical artists to figure out which color space to use.
Awesome, were certainly glad to hear that!
Tthere are some simple scripts available for max and maya to do this automatically, saves a lot of time. For max, check out textools: http://www.renderhjs.net/textools/
For maya, heres a script by Mop (Paul Greveson): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/499159/UVShellHardEdge.mel
For albedo you generally should remove all baked lighting, including AO. You can add AO in with an extra map in the occlusione module.
Gloss and roughness are the same thing, the only thing that differs really is the scale, some engines use black = glossy and others use white = glossy, TB2 by default is white = glossy but there is an invert tick there to support either style.
Im writing something to explain this stuff a bit better, but not sure when it will be done.
My current problem with that, is that if I invert my roughness in Substance to match the gloss map of Toolbag, or that I keep my texture as-is and I use the invert checkbox in toolbag, I don't get the same result. That's a bit problematic therefore for testing in my other app.
The "sRGB" option is enabled for my roughness texture, so I was wondering if the "invert" function does take the gamma space into account when inverting the texture ?
Here is my bloom bug I'm having, I typically like to tune bloom very broad and extremely soft, I haven't seen this issue in other engines. Haven't really debugged this, but it looks like it's coming from the very hot specular reflections from point lights. I'm happy to share the scene if you can't recreate it on your end.
I was thinking about a workaround in adjusting the HDRI so 0 is what the light should be (whatever would do the job). But I couldn't export the HDRI as a picture file out of Marmoset.
Also sometimes it works to export your sky and import it back. but it just works randomly. Couldn't figure out what's the pattern.
Initial tests:
We have a variety of things we need to tweak for better substance support and well look into what we can do here, it may be a limitation of Substance though.
Ok that makes sense. Any specific reason youre loading in your own cube map mesh, instead of loading the background image into the sky lighting system?
I asked about this and unfortunately its a limitation with the bloom technique. It should look better in output screenshots than it does in the viewport, and probably better yet if you output at double res and size down. Try that out and let me know if it helps.
Thats an interesting idea, Ill add it to the suggestion list, thanks.
Sorry, this is a known issue and something that we will have to fix with a future update.
The only work around I am aware of is to pre-offset your sky the amount that it gets changed, I think a user posted this and had some success.
Add a transparancy method in the transparancy module of the shader editor, its near the bottom. Alpha is pulled from the albedo/diffuse alpha channel.
Snippet from the getting started tutorial:
To use transparency, select a transparency model from the Transparency module. Toolbag current supports three types of transparency:
So I have a new WIP
Did a lightingsetup + pose
hope you like it
cheers!
Just curious are there any early whispers/plans for the environment art features to be expanded? For example a functional grid, vertex painting/material blending etc.
Marmoset trumps all other engines for ease-of-use and visual quality but it is missing certain features that would make it a viable alternative to UDK/Cryengine/Unity for non-playable environment art presentation.
How do I select a camera and then view the scene through it? Can't seem to see the option...Thanks in advance!