Can Marmoset 2 display stuff not as a PBS?
polycounter lvl 9
Hi guys,forgive me if the title is not clear or if what I'll ask will be not clear...is just I am confused :poly136:
So,while texturing a piece wich has to go in a standard not pbs game engine and previewing my work in max viewport using Xoliul shader,I decided out of curiosity to throw it into marmoset 2 to check how those basic specular and gloss would have looked in there...
Now,spec and gloss wich seemed perfectly fine for plastic in max,suddenly became mirror-like surfaces inside marmoset 2,throwing me into confusion chaos and despair x_x
The first question that came to my mind was: since marmoset 2 should be more accurate, I should just preview my maps in there while painting them in photoshop and then just doing something like pushing the brightness or some other parameter of my spec/gloss maps before putting those inside the game engine they need to go? Because I thought there should be a constant relation between spec and gloss,so if those 2 are balanced to each other,then should only be a matter if increase/decrease those maps of the same ammount to have them still balanced and showing properly elsewhere. But a friend told me that it doesn't work like this,and the way a PBS software like marmoset works is too much different from a regular old game engine,and the thing would force me to make 2 totally different set of texture if I wanted it to look properly in marmoset and then to look properly in that other engine.
Now,is it true or I got the whole thing wrong?
Using Marmoset for previewing while doing my texture would mean I should build them in a totally different way compared to what I would do "normally"?
How much feasible would be (if at all) doing texture that look properly in there and then modifying those to look correct in this old game engine,and what steps would it require?
Lastly,as the title of the topic said,can stuff be displayed inside marmoset 2 in a "standard" way,to have my gloss and spec displaying pretty much the same way they would appear in any other engine?
I am really confused about this,so forgive me for anything stupid I could have said or thought :poly122:
Shed some light on this please
So,while texturing a piece wich has to go in a standard not pbs game engine and previewing my work in max viewport using Xoliul shader,I decided out of curiosity to throw it into marmoset 2 to check how those basic specular and gloss would have looked in there...
Now,spec and gloss wich seemed perfectly fine for plastic in max,suddenly became mirror-like surfaces inside marmoset 2,throwing me into confusion chaos and despair x_x
The first question that came to my mind was: since marmoset 2 should be more accurate, I should just preview my maps in there while painting them in photoshop and then just doing something like pushing the brightness or some other parameter of my spec/gloss maps before putting those inside the game engine they need to go? Because I thought there should be a constant relation between spec and gloss,so if those 2 are balanced to each other,then should only be a matter if increase/decrease those maps of the same ammount to have them still balanced and showing properly elsewhere. But a friend told me that it doesn't work like this,and the way a PBS software like marmoset works is too much different from a regular old game engine,and the thing would force me to make 2 totally different set of texture if I wanted it to look properly in marmoset and then to look properly in that other engine.
Now,is it true or I got the whole thing wrong?
Using Marmoset for previewing while doing my texture would mean I should build them in a totally different way compared to what I would do "normally"?
How much feasible would be (if at all) doing texture that look properly in there and then modifying those to look correct in this old game engine,and what steps would it require?
Lastly,as the title of the topic said,can stuff be displayed inside marmoset 2 in a "standard" way,to have my gloss and spec displaying pretty much the same way they would appear in any other engine?
I am really confused about this,so forgive me for anything stupid I could have said or thought :poly122:
Shed some light on this please
Replies
Maybe you can edit the textures in a way so that they look correct in the old game.
But here at work for example i only use our engine to texture assets. It doesn't help me if it would look awesome in Marmoset if i can't transfer it into our game. So if it's only for Portfolio then optimize it for whatever engine/renderer you want to show it. But if it's for an actual game then optimize it best for the engine you work with, no matter how it could/would look in other engines.
And yes, if you want to see your model properly in a non PBS engine, and in Marmoset, you will need 2 different texturesets. While that is a daunting, annoying task in photoshop, Substance Designer allows this sort of thing quite easily. Might be worth looking into.
Which is why our studio won't be upgrading to TB2 for the time being..
Also not to deride Marmoset, I actually want to buy it myself soon, but why do you need it in a studio? It's a presentation tool that probably has nothing to do with your engine (it has features that your engine might never get). If you're gonna view your textures externally might as well do it in-engine, no?
Unless you have some terrible engine that's impossible to work with i guess..
There are a few too many variables here to give you a clear answer (such as, what engine will your work go into?). However, it seems like your biggest issues is that your spec/gloss values appear differently in Toolbag than other shaders, a very simple thing you can do is adjust the slider after you import.
Gloss values range from 0 to 1, with 0 (black) being a very rough surface, and 1 (white) being a very glossy surface. Make sure your texture is using that scale, or hit in the invert check if you've authored your content to be black = glossy and white = rough.
What the slider does is maps your input texture to a limited range, say you set your gloss to 0.5, now black still = very rough, but white in your texture will = mid range glossiness. So you can sort of eyeball this to match.
The specular map works the same way, you can adjust the specular intensity slider to cap out at a lower value if your specular reflections are too bright.
As as Lee mentions, you can disable energy conservation and you will get a result closer to older shaders, like what is in Toolbag 1 or Xoliuls shader. With energy conservation the shader will darken the diffuse content if it is too bright (an object cant reflect more light than it receives, so the sum of your diffuse contribution and specular reflection can not = greater than 1). This may make your content seem more reflective.
If youre seeing a big difference in your art content with energy conservation on vs off that likely means it isnt really set up in a logical manner, for either a PBR system or more traditional shaders (PBR isnt all that different, and many base concepts of material definition apply the same to both workflows). For instance, if you have a chrome material, you would want a bright gloss and bright spec, but a very dark (Basically black) diffuse - often times artists make the diffuse portion of metals much too bright which makes them look wrong, again in a PBR system or otherwise.
If you can post some images of your results in TB2, and some images of your target/engine shader that you would like it to match, I may be able to give further advice.
This is not really accurate. Toolbag 1 and Toolbag two both use image based lighting for specular reflections, and standard simple specular for dynamic lights, TB2 is more advanced but it is not a drastically different system. Toolbag 2 does have screen space reflections (local reflections) to offer more accurate reflections from objects in the scene as opposed to only the skybox, but that is an optional feature.
As Lee points out again, you can disable the sky lighting and only use dynamic lights if you want to mimic the look of an old school lighting system, ala Doom 3 or basic max shader style lighting.
The sky brightness value can also be adjusted to reduce the amount of ambient diffuse lighting and ambient specular reflections.
Im not sure that is necessary really, the material system has a lot of values to tweak if youre trying to match the output of a different engine. The biggest difference is likely the scale/mapping of the specular and gloss inputs, which can be easily adjusted.
Hehe, you would be surprised, or well, probably not that surprised, but yes. We do actually have a lot of studios who work Toolbag into their pipeline, I assume because its much faster and easier to load a model and quickly set up a material than to do it in engine.
In fact,it is almost too much information for me to process in only 1 read,so now I need to read it all again and then probably doing some tests :poly124:
Oh,forgot to mention,in case you guys where wondering, the engine I am talking about is Neoaxis engine,is not so bad,but probably not very popular
Xoliul: Thing is,I am doing my weapon (in my other post) for an indie game,not paid for now,so we all know how this things can go (though I am fairly sure this project will succede) so at least I want to get something to display in my portfolio out of this...I basically do it 50% for the game and 50% for my portfolio,so I am interested in it showing "at the best" in both places
Right on the money ;-) (visualization, early PR shots of assets.. yes our engine is very much unusable in that respect right now)
EDIT: And cheers for the explanation EQ. I'll be upgrading my personal toolbag license once a little sale comes along and maybe, after checking out my own oldschool assets, I can convince 'the man' to do so as well.