Some notes for Marmoset 5
interpolator
Hey, some things I want to mention
Im still mostly using 3 as this has a steam version, so maybe something is obsolete, but I used 4 a couple times, however baking was mostly the same and I didn't need texturing, so I didn't upgrade yet, and It looks like my points are still relevant.
For Marmoset 5, some things I would like to suggest:
1. Preset Texture Graph or similar - where you can assign maps to channels of certain channel packed textures. Manually packing textures after baking should be a thing of the past. I have a engine script but still. It shouldnt be as confusing as substance however.
2. The thing annoying me the most about marmoset is that I cant just bake an asset. Pressing bake without a path should do a a bake in a saved location like appdata. I just want to press bake and see something happen, not fumble paths and folders. This should be smooth and seamless. Of course Ill add the path later but its such a tease. (Im just noticing theres a output in preferences, but that dosnt seem to work? - Still first time experience should "just work")
3. (I assume this is fixed in 4) I cannot drag in meshes into the right structure in 3. Just let me drag and drop my highpoly in my highpoly baker. Instead it drops at the bottom in the hierarchy. That is very annoying.
4. One thing that stands out heavily is that AO, Thickness etc take majority of baking time. Maybe it would be a good idea to have a 2 stage bake or a preview feature of sorts (careful that you dont forget that you do preview)
where you do full resolution normal, alpha, material id etc, but do quarter resolution AO, Thickness etc, so you can instantly get to see your baking errors but are not slowed down by long AO bakes, especially AO is very forgiving in texture size. Or maybe per texture resolution settings.
5. This probably exists in 4, but quantization/Snapping on moving things with CTRL. Moving anything in marmoset 3 is frightening because nothing snaps and reloading assets can break transform relations on top. Usually for baking you want to move something exactly 1m away or such and then move it exactly 1m back. With float this is eyeballing or going to type numbers in the transform window which is very clunky.
6. Everytime in marmoset my material palette is a complete mess because its very confusing whats happening. When I bake, I usually import redundant materials with the highpoly, because materials dont matter for a bake, but it keeps bloating the material outliner. And I dont want to change my 3D software export settings every time neither, its prone to error and easy to forget. The baked material is also named "default" which is not very descriptive. I dont need the materials very much at all for just baking but it just dosnt feel good whats going on there, especially if you keep importing new meshes to bake in the same scene you already set up. This might be not really solveable but maybe worth a consideration.
7. Small suggestion, why dont you add a tiny icon for the HDRI presets in the corner of the viewport, showing the current HDRI in a small version, indicating that its changeable. After all this all started with the entire IBL and stuff. Why not make it easy and convenient to switch HDRIs. I keep fumbling and forgetting the place to set the HDRI, its a tiny button in the Sky objects.
8. You have the data, but maybe check how many people bake in any given scene, maybe its worth to have a Baker default created in the scene. Its the small things, but for me, I usually just quickly open marmoset and try do a bake within a couple seconds. The nice thing is that its quite fast to setup (outside of the previously mentioned hiccups) and so I never need to load a scene to just do a quick bake when I need it. If you'd see that 60% of scenes do a bake, it would make sense to have it there maybe, while the others can delete it. In the ideal world, I open marmoset, drag in a highpoly, a lowpoly directly on the right place, and press bake and get some result.
9. Bake material colors to vertex color. It would be nice to be able to get a color ID into vertex
10. You know it - the classic mistake. Smoothing splits vs UV splits. Why not just draw them somehow and show mismatches, since its so critical for a correct bake. Could be enabled with a bool in the baker window.
11. Is it really worth having your own tangent space the default when Unity and Unreal and most things use Mikkt? I know about this for years but again I baked an entire weeks worth of assets in marmoset space now. It wont kill me but its not optimal and very easy trap to fall into. You could maybe even advertise it as superior quality within marmoset. As a wild guess, id assume 50% of users wouldnt know what a tangent space is to begin with.
Hope that is helpful
Best S
Im still mostly using 3 as this has a steam version, so maybe something is obsolete, but I used 4 a couple times, however baking was mostly the same and I didn't need texturing, so I didn't upgrade yet, and It looks like my points are still relevant.
For Marmoset 5, some things I would like to suggest:
1. Preset Texture Graph or similar - where you can assign maps to channels of certain channel packed textures. Manually packing textures after baking should be a thing of the past. I have a engine script but still. It shouldnt be as confusing as substance however.
2. The thing annoying me the most about marmoset is that I cant just bake an asset. Pressing bake without a path should do a a bake in a saved location like appdata. I just want to press bake and see something happen, not fumble paths and folders. This should be smooth and seamless. Of course Ill add the path later but its such a tease. (Im just noticing theres a output in preferences, but that dosnt seem to work? - Still first time experience should "just work")
3. (I assume this is fixed in 4) I cannot drag in meshes into the right structure in 3. Just let me drag and drop my highpoly in my highpoly baker. Instead it drops at the bottom in the hierarchy. That is very annoying.
4. One thing that stands out heavily is that AO, Thickness etc take majority of baking time. Maybe it would be a good idea to have a 2 stage bake or a preview feature of sorts (careful that you dont forget that you do preview)
where you do full resolution normal, alpha, material id etc, but do quarter resolution AO, Thickness etc, so you can instantly get to see your baking errors but are not slowed down by long AO bakes, especially AO is very forgiving in texture size. Or maybe per texture resolution settings.
5. This probably exists in 4, but quantization/Snapping on moving things with CTRL. Moving anything in marmoset 3 is frightening because nothing snaps and reloading assets can break transform relations on top. Usually for baking you want to move something exactly 1m away or such and then move it exactly 1m back. With float this is eyeballing or going to type numbers in the transform window which is very clunky.
6. Everytime in marmoset my material palette is a complete mess because its very confusing whats happening. When I bake, I usually import redundant materials with the highpoly, because materials dont matter for a bake, but it keeps bloating the material outliner. And I dont want to change my 3D software export settings every time neither, its prone to error and easy to forget. The baked material is also named "default" which is not very descriptive. I dont need the materials very much at all for just baking but it just dosnt feel good whats going on there, especially if you keep importing new meshes to bake in the same scene you already set up. This might be not really solveable but maybe worth a consideration.
7. Small suggestion, why dont you add a tiny icon for the HDRI presets in the corner of the viewport, showing the current HDRI in a small version, indicating that its changeable. After all this all started with the entire IBL and stuff. Why not make it easy and convenient to switch HDRIs. I keep fumbling and forgetting the place to set the HDRI, its a tiny button in the Sky objects.
8. You have the data, but maybe check how many people bake in any given scene, maybe its worth to have a Baker default created in the scene. Its the small things, but for me, I usually just quickly open marmoset and try do a bake within a couple seconds. The nice thing is that its quite fast to setup (outside of the previously mentioned hiccups) and so I never need to load a scene to just do a quick bake when I need it. If you'd see that 60% of scenes do a bake, it would make sense to have it there maybe, while the others can delete it. In the ideal world, I open marmoset, drag in a highpoly, a lowpoly directly on the right place, and press bake and get some result.
9. Bake material colors to vertex color. It would be nice to be able to get a color ID into vertex
10. You know it - the classic mistake. Smoothing splits vs UV splits. Why not just draw them somehow and show mismatches, since its so critical for a correct bake. Could be enabled with a bool in the baker window.
11. Is it really worth having your own tangent space the default when Unity and Unreal and most things use Mikkt? I know about this for years but again I baked an entire weeks worth of assets in marmoset space now. It wont kill me but its not optimal and very easy trap to fall into. You could maybe even advertise it as superior quality within marmoset. As a wild guess, id assume 50% of users wouldnt know what a tangent space is to begin with.
Hope that is helpful
Best S
Replies
Also: I would LOVE being able to bake a map to vertex colors, especially Ambient Occlusion. I used to do that a lot back when Maya could do it easily. If Marmoset could replace that functionality, I'd be over the moon.