Is XNormal Still Useful? Should I Switch To Marmoset?

Diethyl

I was just doing a tutorial on creating hair for real time characters and the tutorial used XNormal to bake ID, normal, AO, and height maps. It took an insanely long time to render them all, around 4 hours total, with the AO map taking 3 hours of the total render time. I suspect that maybe my poly count was too high somewhere around 7 million. Even then, I've baked characters with 3-4 million in other programs like Substance Painter and it would take less than a minute or two. Question is, is there any real reason to be using XNormal other than it's being free? It's an x64 program but, I feel like maybe it's not really optimized for dual core architecture as it's an old program that's been around since x86 so maybe that's why it's so slow. Do people still use XNormal because the results are more accurate or is it just a thing of loyalty/habit? Should I just learn marmoset and do my baking there?

Diethyl

Just realized a second ago that I did not set the render to hardware renderer, probably why it took so long.

Alex_J

I think its mostly legacy. xnormal precedes marmoset. and its free.

marmoset is worth the cost IMO for the baking alone. It just makes it very fast and easy.

I like the new texturing workflow in marmoset a lot as well. I prefer it to substance, though admittedly it is not as mature. But for my needs it suits me fine.

Diethyl

That's what I was thinking. The only reason I considered it might still be relevant was that it was being used by Johan Lithvall a guy who designs some really nice hair for AAA's, he did the hair in the Horizon and Spiderman games. I wish Japanese devs shared more about their process for example how Capcom does their hair in RE4 remake. From what I've seen online I think Capcom uses Fibershop to create the hair textures/baked normals because they are listed as a client on Fibershops website.

Alex_J

there is at least one person here who is a regular name and seems to be specialized in hair. I cant remember now. Thomas something? Might look through the sketchbooks, you might find some tips from them.

it may be that xnormal can bake certain types of maps that marmoset cant. Or just that guy already knows it fluently so why bother learning something new.