Marmoset vs Blender EEVEE for portfolio renders?

elios

Hi everyone. Not sure if this belongs here or somewhere else.

I noticed that pretty much everyone, especially in the Substance Designer niche, uses Marmoset to do the portfolio renders of their materials. While this does seem more like a convenience/habbit thing, I have been wondering, is there any reason not to do it in EEVEE, even if I have no issues using it? Like, say, if EEVEE renders things in a way that does not really reflect how a game engine would do it (vs Marmoset) - or something along these lines. 

So far, it seems that the choice just comes down to convenience and not any techical issues. Also, I think Artstation usually allows using both EEVEE and Marmoset for its game asset competitions...?

myclay

It is for sure convenience.

Toolbag has an Integrated sbsar importer.

Blender has an officially from Adobe created sbsar importer but you need to login into Adobes forum/account to download it.

Toolbag allows an easy export for showing your 3D scene on webpages/portfolio.

If it´s for general portfolio purposes and you just want to show a great result: use whatever you want.

If you want to concentrate on the artist side, using Realtime Rendering solutions like Blenders Eevee as well as Toolbag are great and can bring you very far on their own.

Remember thou, Realtime Renderers are not Game Engines.

A couple years back, I extensively used Toolbag and was allured by the back then existing Marmoset Toolbag to Unreal Importer.
Thought I struck gold with this shortcut and could just concentrate on Toolbag, hone my skills there and simply I/O entire scene setups into Unreal.

My goal was to make a game. That taken shortcut with Toolbag substituting (lacking) knowledge in Unreal was resulting in straight up disaster. Great learning experience but still a Use case disaster. I failed to grasp why my stuff didn´t look like the carefully crafted Toolbag Scene and not knowing how to fix occurred visual discrepancies between Toolbag vs Unreal.

Avoid the temptation to compensate a lack of knowledge with just using a real time renderer and relying on automation/translation tools to bring that data into the game engine of your choice.

If you want to show more than cool renders/clips and highlight additional skills - pick the right tool - the game engine you want the data to actually be in.
When a competition encourages you to use Realtime renderers then use what is to your liking with the set challenge rules.

It all comes down and depends on the use case. Eevee is excellent and Toolbag is a great tool depending on how and what you utilize it for.

iam717

just tossing my .02's, (for me) its having to learn how to do all the things marmoset does in blender, the material coding stuff like the channel default cube(youtuber) does, i really got comfortable with drag drop play with numbers.   Now-a-days even more so, time is valuable and i suppose i am getting stubborn in my ways and hope one day, marmoset becomes its own, "Epyc Engine" and i didn't put my time into it wastefully, to just switch over to blender...

elios

myclay said:

It is for sure convenience.

iam717 said:

just tossing my .02's

Thanks for the replies!
I will stick to blender for now then, since I already do the majority of my work there anyway, materials aside. It can be pretty annoying having to learn and use yet another whole separate software just to do this one specific thing.

Noth

@elios tbh Marmoset is super intuitive and runs really nicely, it does a specific job really well, imo blender : marmoset isn't really a direct comparison. Sure there's overlap, but marmoset was built for realtime viewing and baking originally, it does this super well. Afaik it has features for this that nothing else does.