Textures Are a Mess

cartermrobbinson

I'm new to Marmoset, and I'm still grappling with texturing, in general.

I have a basic OBJ file for the walls of a room imported into TB2. But any of the presets I use lay the textures horribly wrong. This is something probably pretty basic. What am I missing?

This happens when exporting the walls mesh as OBJ or FBX.

See screen shot.

Thank you in advance if you have time to respond.

Edit: I've read through the manual but haven't found an answer. Granted, the manual is for v1.0.

almighty_gir

It looks like your mesh either has no UV's or is being exported without them. I'd check that first

cartermrobbinson

Thanks, almighty_gir.

Looks like that was at least part of it. I did a test of just a single wall, with UVs.
Exported as OBJ.
Imported to Marmoset, and put the Quixel Brick material on.

Where do UV's show up in Marmo?
Where can I adjust how big/small the images appear on the meshes?

Thank you.

EarthQuake

Currently we do not support uv tiling directly in Marmoset Toolbag, so you will have to set up your uvs exactly how you want them in your 3d app before exporting. This means scaling the uvs in the uv editor to tile the desired amount.

cartermrobbinson

Thanks EarthQuake. I'll give that a try. UV'ing and texturing is still something I struggle with.

cartermrobbinson

I've been playing w/ the UV's in Lightwave, and then exporting my wall, which is just a simple rectangular cube, no chamfers. Keeping it simple while I learn.

By resizing UV's in LW I can make the brick texture in Marmoset larger/smaller, but two more questions arise:

1. The Quixel Brick tex is smaller, but now you can see the tiling. How can I correct that?

2. Circled in the attached screenshot is an option to pick UV Set 0 or 1. What does that mean?
Does it apply only to the Occlusion Maps section?

Thank you.

cartermrobbinson

So, I've been working on this, trying numerous ways of doing the UV's in LW, and exporting as OBJ into Marmoset.

If I have a plain poly cube (elongated as a rectangle), not subpatched, just regular polys, so to speak, and straight edges, the textures in Toolbag work well.
The wall has no chamfers or rounded edges.

If I try subpatching the wall, or chamfering the edges with only one poly, the textures are a mess.
I have tried a simple planar map along the Z in LW, but with a small chamfered edge the textures in Marmo are a mess.

What am I missing?

EarthQuake

To your first question: There is no easy way to make the tiling less noticeable with the Quixel textures, you can either edit those textures significantly or make your own that tile with less artifacts. The Quixel preset materials are meant to be examples of calibrated PBR materials rather than ready to use tiling textures.

To your second question: It looks like lightwave is saving out bad UV data. Be sure to delete all extra uvs sets as the OBJ exporter only supports 1 uv channel (IIRC) and if you have multiple uv sets it may grab the wrong one. To verify this, load up the file you're exporting and double check the uvs.

cartermrobbinson

EarthQuake wrote: »

To your first question: There is no easy way to make the tiling less noticeable with the Quixel textures, you can either edit those textures significantly or make your own that tile with less artifacts. The Quixel preset materials are meant to be examples of calibrated PBR materials rather than ready to use tiling textures.

To your second question: It looks like lightwave is saving out bad UV data. Be sure to delete all extra uvs sets as the OBJ exporter only supports 1 uv channel (IIRC) and if you have multiple uv sets it may grab the wrong one. To verify this, load up the file you're exporting and double check the uvs.

Thank you for the reply and information, EarthQuake. I appreciate it, as Marmoset is still new for me, and as I mentioned, texturing is a challenge I'm working on

Unfortunately, this seems to be another mark against LW. It seems there are so many issues that keep coming out that are never fixed. Might have to move over to Blender completely.

Thanks again.

EarthQuake

I don't think it's a lightwave specific issue, the same will happen if you have multiple uv channels in Modo, Maya or Max. Its more of a general 3d modeling thing, just make sure you don't have any extra uv maps. Though Modo and Lightwave do tend to automatically create new uv layouts with certain operations which always seemed a bit silly.

cartermrobbinson

Okay. Thank you. Now that you mention it, I see that I have had multiple UV maps that I've created as I tried to fix the mapping issues.

Btw, I have to say that thus far I'm really impressed by Marmoset's support. This is a small app, and if I'm not mistaken, a very small company. But your support is more responsive and quicker to reply than several huge 3D companies I've worked with.

Thanks again.

cartermrobbinson

I got it working! Had to play with a lot of different settings for LW's OBJ export, but I got it to work.

If anyone has a similar issue I attached a screen shot of the settings I used.

Basically, open General Options in LW.
Under OBJ tab, check mark these:
- OBJ One Layer
- OBJ One VMap
- OBJ Write Normals
- OBJ Merge Points

Thanks.

cartermrobbinson

One more question.
I have a room with two booleaned windows. There's a separate mesh of a table and chairs in the room.

But the rest of the room doesn't block the HDRI lighting. It still looks like light is coming from everywhere. Everything is set to cast shadows.

What am I missing?

Thank you.

almighty_gir

One thing you could try for this (and it may be a stretch, our IBL doesn't really account for occlusion like this). Select a point on the sky texture to create a directional light for the scene that will be pointing in toward the doorway, and change the lighting setup so it's a very broad light with shadows. this might hopefully force some shadows into the room.

cartermrobbinson

Thanks, almighty-gir.

I did try that a little while after posting, but it really didn't do much. I also tried several ways of building the room in LW, and exporting. None of them worked.

I can't believe that there wouldn't be some way to do this, even a workaround. Do you know how images such as this, from the homepage gallery, are created?

http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/gallery

Thank you.

almighty_gir

Which image in particular?

cartermrobbinson

Whoops! I didn't catch that it only links to the main gallery. Here are two example images.

almighty_gir

i would guess at very very low ambient light brightness (sky brightness) and use of direct lights as a priority.

cartermrobbinson

Okay, I'll give that a try. Thank you for your help!

EarthQuake

Unfortunately there is no way to occlude image based lighting in Toolbag 2. Calculating shadows from the image-based lighting is very expensive to do in real time which is one of the primary reasons we have not implemented that feature. As we go forward, we will be looking into some sort of radiosity or occlusion feature, but this is likely a long term, down the road sort of thing.

One thing you can try to do is load a light preset that represents and interior space rather, and as Lee suggests, turning down the ambient image based lighting and using the dynamic lights primarily is currently the best method for lighting interior spaces.

cartermrobbinson

Hi EarthQuake,

Okay, thank you.

Out of curiosity, you mentioned down the road you might implement a radiosity feature. Doesn't Marmoset currently do Global Illumination? Isn't that the same as radiosity?

Thanks.

EarthQuake

First off, radiosity is essentially the same thing as global illumination, that is correct. However, Marmoset Toolbag does not have a radiosity/GI solution at this point.

We support image based lighting, which is not really the same thing. IBL allows you to load a HDR, 360 degree panoramic image for lighting information, while radiosity/GI are complex rendering algorithms that calculate light bouncing off of objects.

We do support screen-space ambient occlusion as well, but this is not nearly as complex or powerful as full on radiosity/GI, and is similar to the type of SSAO you will see in many games.

cartermrobbinson

Thanks, EarthQuake. Good info.
I had always thought that IBL was tied to GI, in that you need GI turned on for IBL to work. At least that's how I remember it in LW and Maya. But maybe I was doing it wrong.