why bake with marmoset?

oraeles77

i was wondering if the bake feature in marmoset is just like baking in other 3d software such as Blender or Substance Designer, for example, normals of high poly to low poly etc, or is it for something else? 

at the moment I only use marmoset for rendering stuff after I've baked things in different software. or am I missing something?

EarthQuake

First and foremost, Toolbag is a fast and high quality GPU baker. Other bakers may have one or two features that you'll find in Toolbag, but overall Toolbag is most complete baking app on the market (though I am of course biased).

Here are some notable features:

• Real-time 3D bake previews. As you adjust bake settings you get a preview of your bake on your model in real-time, which greatly speeds up the workflow. Small changes will only update the area you're working on, which means instant preview. With most other bakers you're "flying blind" and have to wait for the bake to finish before spotting errors, which can make the process very slow.
• Skew map painting, you can paint directly on the mesh to fixed skewed detail.
• Cage sculpting, you can sculpt your cage in and you with a easy to use brush to make sure the cage covers the high poly. The Estimate Offset feature can automate this process as well. Custom cages are supported too
• Texture set support, bake maps to multiple texture sets (body, head, armor, etc) all at once.
• Bake groups provide you a way to isolate groups of high and low meshes to prevent intersection errors. There's no longer any need to explode your meshes or bake objects individually.
• AO is cast from group to group as well, so you don't need to mix in a low poly AO map bake either. This feature can be toggled off per group too, so you can turn it off for moving parts or other areas that shouldn't cast or received AO to / from other objects.
• The Quick Loader uses name matching to set up bake groups, making the whole process very simple and easy.
• Layered PSD support, you can export all bakes as a single PSD, with layers set up with automatic masks based on material IDs. This is really useful if you're using a PS-centric texturing workflow
• Many, many map types.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2LlmbFBbc

More info here: https://marmoset.co/posts/toolbag-baking-tutorial/

Check out some of the latest features here: https://marmoset.co/posts/free-update-toolbag-3-05/

hansolocambo

Well sure, after reading this amazing list of features, using anything else to bake sounds crazy I didn't know about the ability to sculpt the cage ? I'm gonna have to look at that ! Would have definitely helped in some cases where I had to detach pieces of a same object that would cast rays on each other.

EarthQuake

hansolocambo said:

Well sure, after reading this amazing list of features, using anything else to bake sounds crazy I didn't know about the ability to sculpt the cage ? I'm gonna have to look at that ! Would have definitely helped in some cases where I had to detach pieces of a same object that would cast rays on each other.

Yeah the cage sculpting is great for solving that sort of thing in tight areas, especially when it's a watertight mesh that you don't want to split.

If it's two unique objects, you can separate them into different bake groups and that will solve intersection errors as well.

MDiamond

• Layered PSD support, you can export all bakes as a single PSD, with layers set up with automatic masks based on material IDs. This is really useful if you're using a PS-centric texturing workflow

Can the masks be set to use vertex colors instead of Material IDs? Sounds like a super good feature.

EarthQuake

MDiamond said:

• Layered PSD support, you can export all bakes as a single PSD, with layers set up with automatic masks based on material IDs. This is really useful if you're using a PS-centric texturing workflow

Can the masks be set to use vertex colors instead of Material IDs? Sounds like a super good feature.

Toolbag supports baking of vertex colors (RGB & Alpha), but that system is not hooked up to the automatic mask generation at this time - that only works with the material ID data.

C86G

easy
fast
beautiful

Seriously, after your first bake you won´t ever want to use another baker.

EarthQuake

C86G said:

easy
fast
beautiful

Seriously, after your first bake you won´t ever want to use another baker.

goekbenjamin

is it possible to preview the bakes of only a certain mesh?
like when i have then meshes..and i change only the cage of one mesh..than all others get updated too which slows all down.

EarthQuake

goekbenjamin said:

is it possible to preview the bakes of only a certain mesh?
like when i have then meshes..and i change only the cage of one mesh..than all others get updated too which slows all down.

You can disable auto-bake updates per Low slot. Click on the Low object and change Auto-Bake from Quick to None.

CybranM

Is it possible to load a cage file? 

EarthQuake

CybranM said:

Is it possible to load a cage file? 

Yep, see custom cages here: https://marmoset.co/posts/free-update-toolbag-3-05/

Synaesthesia

C86G said:

easy
fast
beautiful

Seriously, after your first bake you won´t ever want to use another baker.

Bears repeating. Toolbag's baking cannot be touched by anything else I've tried, and I've used quite a few tools. It's currently how I handle baking on System Shock.

SkyGround

Main feature - realtime bake preview and cage tweaking. 
But it's ok when you have pretty simple hipoly - 10-30 ml polies. On heavy things - 40-50 or higher - you will suffer, Even if hide hipoly mesh - it starts to run super slow. It's hard for me to use it on such things even on good rig - I7, 1080, 64 GB ram

So on heavy models and when client is ok without Marmoset (some AAA projects requring bakes in Marmoset) - I will prefer Substance Designer - UI is much better, no lags, all other features - same. On simple stuff - Marmoset is little bit faster

Marmoset is also having problems with bug fixing - it taked about 8 months to fix Vertex ID bake issue  wrong colors with and no padding.
Also - it has problem with baking somthing with deep holes - cuz it use same rat distance for inside ray, wich often needs to be deeper

goekbenjamin

can marmoset "base texture to bake" too? like in xnormal?

EarthQuake

goekbenjamin said:

can marmoset "base texture to bake" too? like in xnormal?

Yes, Toolbag can bake many material types. What you need to do is set up the high poly material with the source textures you want to bake. For instance:

• Albedo
• Specular
• Gloss
• Roughness
• Metalness
• Normal
• Emissive
• Vertex color

One thing Toolbag can't do is generate baked data maps (like AO and curvature) from the high poly's normal map - but it's very easy to transfer albedo / diffuse maps and such.

HundredMonkeys

Does Marmoset currently bake curvature maps directly from the high poly mesh? (Sounds like that's a better approach) vs. generating it from the normal map. I saw in the recent feature update vid from Allegorithmic that they're adding a curvature from mesh baker in Substance Designer and claiming that it produces much cleaner maps going that route - they talk about it at 23:47 on the vid. https://youtu.be/OkuHPZIe1wU?t=1416

EarthQuake

@HundredMonkeys Yes, Toolbag bakes curvature directly from the high poly mesh. It doesn't generate it from the normal map. And yes, this does create better bakes, because you're not baking any artifacts from the tangent space normal map into the curvature.

HundredMonkeys

I'm curious on best practices - if I'm using Marmoset in my pipeline, and modifying the baking cage, (adjusting size, painting to raise, lower sections, adjusting skew, etc. Then bake my AO, Normal, Curvature - then bring those into Substance Painter to bake the remaining maps, it seems like there'd be a difference in the cage. (Even if I adjusted the cage distance in Substance Painter - wouldn't I still be creating differences in the bake?) Is it better to bake all the maps in one or the other? (Ideally, we'd be able to export the cage from Marm, but doesn't look like that's currently supported - unless I'm missing something).

EarthQuake

@HundredMonkeys it would be best to bake all maps in one app. Toolbag uses some propriety tools like skew painting, and there isn't an easy way to replicate the cage in Substance Painter or any other baker at the moment.

I'm not sure I fully understand why you would want to bake in two different applications. Are there maps that you're not able to bake in Toolbag?

HundredMonkeys

I ran tests on baking Normal/AO maps across the various baking tools, Max, Zbrush, XNormal, Handplane, Knald, Marmoset, Substance Painter - then compared the final results in both Max and UE4. I was getting the best results from Marmoset, (Plus the cage creation tools are the most intuitive). I'm using Substance Painter for texture/material creation. I did another test, where I baked everything but the position map in Marm, brought that into Substance Painter (baked just the position map in SB), assigned each of the maps, then applied some materials to the geo. At a quick glance, It seems to work fine. I'd need to do an A/B test on baking all the maps out in SB, then export to Max/UE4 to see if there are noticeable differences. My gut tells me that it's probably wiser to bake in one package like your suggesting, In this case, I do wonder if Substance Painter generates maps in a way that it's expecting.

AlexandrL

Just to keep all that info and opinion up to date for new users, here's my 5cents:
2021 and we have Substance Painter 2021. Still not able to combine all the maps to one. If you have multiple meshes setup you will end with "number of meshes * number of baked maps".
So you have a simple knife model with "handle" and "blade", and you need base color, roughness, metallic and normal. You will get 8 texture files in the end. 4 for "handle" and 4 for "blade". And Painter unable to automatically combine all normal maps to one, all base color to one and so on. Imagine 10, 13, 20 parts model where you also want to bake AO...

There's some utility, not even from Allegorithmics/Adobe - https://www.artstation.com/artwork/DgBDo
Kind of do the job, but i sometimes get artifacts from it, maybe thats my fault, i m not sure. Anyway its not fun to deal with third-party unilities, tons of files, and so on, for such simply (generally) task which indeed should be implemented in Painter right from start!

Aditya18102

@EarthQuake Hello, I Have a question. Blender has a feature called combine bake I think which combine all PBR maps to 1 map(fake PBR) along with lighting, I know it's not a quality method but a awesome feature for optimization work so question is will I get this option in marmoset or substance painter ?

DavidCruz

AlexandrL said:

Just to keep all that info and opinion up to date for new users, here's my 5cents:
2021 and we have Substance Painter 2021. Still not able to combine all the maps to one.

^Make two versions, one separated and one "attached", i always paint and or "work", in painter with 1 Material set and it all comes out together, just a heads up.  I ran into this issue two the solution is 1 whole piece.(FOR ME) then again idc about udims(+) so idk how complicated your designs are so results may vary i guess.

Edit: i might be mis-reading what you posted.