Marmoset Viewer Filesize Weirdness

dan_s

hey guys,

i'm fairly new to marmoset...finishing my 2nd viewer model right now and i have run into a weird issue.

either i'm not understanding how marmoset compiles the viewer files or there's a bug of some kind.

i loaded up my model (~35k polys) and started setting up the materials with 8k png textures exported from
substance painter just to see if i like the way it looked. did some final tweaks and then ended up with a viewer
file of about 30mb with the textures set to "unreasonable" in TB.

so time to size down and compress some of the textures right?

went into photoshop and sized down the textures and compressed them in jpg format (except for one emissive
that needs transparency). all of the textures combined now take up a little more than 10mb.
when i switched out the png files in TB with the smaller and compressed jpg files however i ended up with
a viewer file of almost 40mb!

so:
~200mb 8k png textures -> 30mb viewer
~10mb downsized and compressed jpgs  -> 40mb viewer

what am i missing here?

i did pretty much the same thing on my first viewer model and it worked nicely...managed to cut down the size
from ~35mb to ~12mb.

cheers
daniel

EarthQuake

Textures are automatically compressed on export, so it won't help to compress them to JPEG or PNG before loading into Toolbag. Textures are resized depending on the quality setting as well, so it generally won't be productive to resize them unless you're making them smaller than the resolution cap associated with the quality setting.

For more information on what happens on export, read this: http://www.marmoset.co/viewer/support#ex

If you need to drop your file size, you need to do some or all of the following:
1. Drop the quality setting, this will cap the texture resolution and use more aggressive compression settings.
2. Selectively resize textures. Sometimes you can resize a diffuse map, or a spec map. Keep in mind that spec and gloss maps are packed in the same texture, so if you resize one, resize both.
3. Make sure to turn off lossless normal maps, this makes the files much larger.

It does seem rather odd that compressing the textures before they get to Toolbag would result a larger viewer file, however, it's really hard to say why this is without knowing exactly what you've done.

dan_s

hey, thanks for your reply.

as i understand it when the texture quality is set to "unreasonable" it's 4k maximum right?
so what i did is i selectively (like you said) scaled down the textures to be less than 4k (except for the normals which i would like to stay at 4k), some as small as 256x256 actually, and compressed them as jpgs on quality setting 10 in photoshop. then i replaced the higher res textures in the project with the jpgs...i really didn't do anything else:)
you think that maybe TB "recompressed" the jpgs and actually made the files larger again? if so that would be counter intuitive. a "don't re-compress" option would be useful to allow more control over texture quality.

also, does TB save one iteration of each texture per material in the scene? because it might explain how a ~2mb mesh + ~10mb of textures results in a 40mb viewer file.
but i assume TB is smart enough to recognize when a texture is used multiple times in a project and store it only once in the viewer file?

lossless normal maps were not enabled btw.

it is really weird...i will try and set up the scene fresh again. maybe something went wrong with the project file along the way...

EarthQuake

Yeah, unreasonable caps to 4K with the best quality compression.

Toolbag has to process the files, depending on exactly how the material is set up, pack them in a custom manner and then compress them on export. I would not recommend loading compressed JPEGs directly into Toolbag, as the exporter compresses them, and the quality settings you choose determine the quality of compression. Compressing before the file gets to Toolbag means it will be compressed twice, which will reduce quality, and may have something to do with the file size weirdness.

I would suggest trying to reduce the resolution of your scene again, but using an uncompressed format like TGA. Make sure you've re-linked all of your textures too, if you've accidentally left one of the full resolution textures in there, that may explain file size oddities.

Toolbag should not be saving the same texture multiple times if they are used in multiple materials.

I hope this helps.

dan_s

hey,

so i rebuilt the scene today and used uncompressed *.tif files for the textures...only resized them selectively. the result was better actually...around 25mb with "unreasonable" setting and ~9mb on "high". so the compression is probably what's making the biggest difference here...it's unfortunate that there's no way to set these seperately.

well, guess i'll have to go with "high" for now...maybe at some point there's gonna be more in depth export options.

thanks for your help!