all you need to do is invert the green channel in your nm.
[edit] you seem to be getting stranger issues than i am here, but for certain you need to flip the green channel.
Take some time and read through the tutorial.txt file and make sure you're not doing anything weird, make sure your model is nested inside /base/ as well.
You've also got some minor seams and smoothing errors in your normal map, most likely from using a NM rendered in max. If you load up a flat grey texture for the diffuse/spec it will be easy to see. Best solution here would be to render in xnormal, with OBJ or better yet .mesh format(save out your bake mesh in toolbag as .mesh, and load it in Xnormal using the "stooge" file format).
Hm.... ya I did the NM in max. I can checkout the green channel and see how that works. I have xNormal and have tried using it once.
The AO seems to be quite nice, but idk about normals... my projection kept missing. Even after trying quite low and very high distances it didn't really seem to help.
Edit: Ya, the green flipping fixed it . So is that only for this engine, or in general?
Good question! Refraction and glass materials are supported however not editable in Toolbag since we didn't get around to exposing all material features, just the most commonly used ones. You'll have to edit the material files by hand for this one.
Open the .mat file in notepad and change the material type from EnvironmentPhong to ComplexRefraction. This lighting model supports Diffuse, Specular, and Normal maps and is rendered as a second pass over everything else. The way the alpha and glass opacity are determined is a little weird. The opacity of the glass is determined by the specular map alpha channel, and in addition to this, regular alpha blending and testing is done with the alpha channel from the diffuse map. The shader works as follows:
This way you can use the same material and textures to make the glass in a window pane but mask off normal, opaque surfaces for the window frame.
I can't seem to get this to work, every time I load up the edited .mat it doesn't show anything in the channel model slot, and when I click on it and try to scroll through the model list it crashes. I've tried different text editors, shaders of varying complexity, different textures but nothing seems to work. As far as I can tell all it's successfully reading from the .mat file is the physical material property. Halp!
The AO seems to be quite nice, but idk about normals... my projection kept missing. Even after trying quite low and very high distances it didn't really seem to help.
Did you set up a cage? There's a tutorial on the xnormal page if you're not sure how to do it. You could also try breaking your mesh into a pieces and baking them individually.
Hm.... ya I did the NM in max. I can checkout the green channel and see how that works. I have xNormal and have tried using it once.
The AO seems to be quite nice, but idk about normals... my projection kept missing. Even after trying quite low and very high distances it didn't really seem to help.
Edit: Ya, the green flipping fixed it . So is that only for this engine, or in general?
Theres generally the 2 different methods, max and maya, marmoset uses the maya standard and the only difference is the green channel is fliped. Every engine/shader will use one or the other.
I can't seem to get this to work, every time I load up the edited .mat it doesn't show anything in the channel model slot, and when I click on it and try to scroll through the model list it crashes. I've tried different text editors, shaders of varying complexity, different textures but nothing seems to work. As far as I can tell all it's successfully reading from the .mat file is the physical material property. Halp!
As was stated there is no UI for the material. So you just have to create a material, and edit all of the paramaters by hand in notepad. You wont be able to change any settings realtime because there isnt a UI for it. So trying to change channel mode will crash. Just apply the material to your mesh. Also, post your materail here, because there may be some missing information you need to add as well.
When i'm working with glass stuff, i have a little hack-workaround. what i do is i'll set up the file in notepad, and then i'll create an additional "dummy" material that references all the textures, then as i edit hte textures in PS, i can go to my dummy material and reload them.
Thanks for the material hacking info, glad it was a good question :P
I'm quickly getting the hang of this tool and my questions keep adding up! Here's a couple more!
- Are there any other shader goodies we can activate by hacking the material? Falloff? Translucency? Animated Textures? etc..
- Along the same question, can we activate 2sidedness that same way?
- I'm having a hard time making 2 sided alphas for some furry planes in my model. if i just duplicate the planes and flip the normals (as is the usual workaround in engines), i get a lot of shadow artifacts showing on the wrong side, even if i put some distance between them. How should i go about making 2sided alpha planes without getting shadow issues?
My model's almost done i'll be sure to post a shot here if i can get around that issue
Nope no other special materials that i know of, sorry.
You can do 2-sided materials by turning off "use culling" in the material. This isnt really a good solution tho because;
1. The lighting is incorrect on one side
2. The shadows get all screwed up
The best thing to do is simply duplicate and flip your geometry.
Oh wait you're getting issues with that too, oh well in that case try turning off shadow casting entirely for just the planes(use a separate material).
Right, the problem i'm having with my 2sided attempts is exactly the shadow issue from turning off culling, except just in the area where the planes come near each other.
What I've been doing is taking one screenshot with and one without shadows and just shopping out the problem area. But i mean i couldn't do a turnaround movie that way. Please do keep us posted on developments on the 2sided front.
Right now the viewer has a lot if little quirks such as that, which i look forward to seeing resolved (hope more builds are to come)! Then this thing could become a real solid tool for quick-draw engine-style viewing/rendering. for now it feels "Oooo, Almost there" keep it up!
ps: are you guys interested in people posting suggestions for features and fixes in this thread? Cuz i have a little list building up as i use it.
That's the material I'm using. The strange thing is, when I apply it to the glass mesh the only change I see is that it starts using the normal map from the mesh/material underneath it. Very weird.
The dummy material (nice trick btw) works fine, though.
It may be that the space in "vending machine" is screwing up the file load, spaces are never good in folder/file names for this sort of thing. So get rid of that. I think the shader also needs to always have an alphatest line in there so add "AlphaTest 0.1". You'll probabbly want to use a high specular exponent as well.
Right, the problem i'm having with my 2sided attempts is exactly the shadow issue from turning off culling, except just in the area where the planes come near each other.
What I've been doing is taking one screenshot with and one without shadows and just shopping out the problem area. But i mean i couldn't do a turnaround movie that way. Please do keep us posted on developments on the 2sided front.
Right now the viewer has a lot if little quirks such as that, which i look forward to seeing resolved (hope more builds are to come)! Then this thing could become a real solid tool for quick-draw engine-style viewing/rendering. for now it feels "Oooo, Almost there" keep it up!
ps: are you guys interested in people posting suggestions for features and fixes in this thread? Cuz i have a little list building up as i use it.
Always good to hear feedback, but i dont think the programmers really have any time that they're able to dedicate to the app other than serious bug fixes, atleast in the short term.
How do you load in more than one mesh? Each time I try it just replaces the one that is currently in there, or is not possible to display more than one contiguous mesh?
i have a problem. couldnt found a solution in that thread. i installed marmorset and put my .obj with its maps into toolbag--> base folder. i hit open mesh and choose my .obj and then.... crash, marmorset closed. am i stupid and the tool dont likes me or what did i wrong? hmm... dont know. did someone had the same problem?
After using it for a week or two, here's a short list of things i'm aching for :
- Fix shadow issues when trying to get something 2 sided
- 2 sided materials
- RGB input for the colour selection dialogs
- Autospin the model in the same way you can with the environment (for making video turnarounds).
- Make navigation center on the model instead of wherever it is by default for the first few movements.
- (Unless i missed something) It would be nice to load image maps directly in the sky tab, instead of need to load that special scene format. I couldn't figure out how to make that format out of new images i brought into the environment editor.
I think that's everything i can think of for now! :P
- Make navigation center on the model instead of wherever it is by default for the first few movements.
- (Unless i missed something) It would be nice to load image maps directly in the sky tab, instead of need to load that special scene format. I couldn't figure out how to make that format out of new images i brought into the environment editor.
Nice model.
There's a 'center mesh' button on the 'file' tab that I've been finding rather useful at times.
There's also a writeup earlier in the thread on making those .env files.
i have a problem. couldnt found a solution in that thread. i installed marmorset and put my .obj with its maps into toolbag--> base folder. i hit open mesh and choose my .obj and then.... crash, marmorset closed. am i stupid and the tool dont likes me or what did i wrong? hmm... dont know. did someone had the same problem?
Before you let it crash(hit ok in windows or whatever) look in the console and see if it has any errors listed there. Othere than that, make sure your OBJ exporter is set up correctly(exporting UVs, normals, etc).
OH! I almost forgot the biggest issue i had!!
If i leave the tool running for a couple hours as i go back and forth between max photoshop and the viewer, suddenly it starts lagging my computer TERRIBLY.
I'm talking no input response for 1 minute, then 1 second of control, then 2 minutes of no control, 30 seconds of control, then 3 minutes of no control again. So on and so forth until my machine is completely deadlocked! There's no way to close the program with the extremely limited control time when it happens.
I'm 100% sure that the viewer is at least part of the cause of this slowdown because it only happens while i have it open. It happened once while max and PS were open, and once while just PS was open. I use an intuos 3 for input just for information's sake.
I couldn't tell you what the problem could be but this should definitely be brought to the attention of programmers. My machine can Zbrush up to 11million polys in one mesh without breaking a sweat, so it's definitely not my machine being too weak for this simple viewer.
Anyone else had tremendous slowdown if not complete lock up while using it?
OH! I almost forgot the biggest issue i had!!
If i leave the tool running for a couple hours as i go back and forth between max photoshop and the viewer, suddenly it starts lagging my computer TERRIBLY.
I'm talking no input response for 1 minute, then 1 second of control, then 2 minutes of no control, 30 seconds of control, then 3 minutes of no control again. So on and so forth until my machine is completely deadlocked! There's no way to close the program with the extremely limited control time when it happens.
I'm 100% sure that the viewer is at least part of the cause of this slowdown because it only happens while i have it open. It happened once while max and PS were open, and once while just PS was open. I use an intuos 3 for input just for information's sake.
I couldn't tell you what the problem could be but this should definitely be brought to the attention of programmers. My machine can Zbrush up to 11million polys in one mesh without breaking a sweat, so it's definitely not my machine being too weak for this simple viewer.
Anyone else had tremendous slowdown if not complete lock up while using it?
Sounds like a memory leak of some sort. Does it do this every time you leave it on for that long?
I still can't uderstand what toolbag is doing whit specular- i mean is there any way to regulate the power of specularity?
I checked vahl jedi model and there we got standard setup: color, normal , and specular maps. The last one is very dark and the specularity on model is very subtle and nice.
But on my model the specularity is waaay too strong and even after i copied the vahl's material, i made specularity map almost black, and i didn't help...
Is there somthing i am missing of what?
I still can't uderstand what toolbag is doing whit specular- i mean is there any way to regulate the power of specularity?
I checked vahl jedi model and there we got standard setup: color, normal , and specular maps. The last one is very dark and the specularity on model is very subtle and nice.
But on my model the specularity is waaay too strong and even after i copied the vahl's material, i made specularity map almost black, and i didn't help...
Is there somthing i am missing of what?
Specular Intensity slider, just below where you plugged in your spec map. Think of the spec map as deciding the relative spec intensities of your materials (ie. your metal is 3X stronger than your rubber, because it's at ~0.9 brightness while your rubber is ~0.3) and the slider determines the overall specular intensity (ie. how bright are '0' and '1' brightness values).
I still can't uderstand what toolbag is doing whit specular- i mean is there any way to regulate the power of specularity?
I checked vahl jedi model and there we got standard setup: color, normal , and specular maps. The last one is very dark and the specularity on model is very subtle and nice.
But on my model the specularity is waaay too strong and even after i copied the vahl's material, i made specularity map almost black, and i didn't help...
Is there somthing i am missing of what?
There are multiple ways to control specular intensity.
1. You can use an image to dictate intensity and color
2. You can also tweak the specular color, if you have no specular image, this is your specular value, if you do have an image this color value will multiply your image.
3. You can use specular intensity to multiply both your image, and color.
So if you notice the specular is too high, just set the specular intensity to 0.25, or whatever value feels right. Really one could argue there are toooo many ways adjust specular strength as it is.
One thing that may be throwing you off tho, if you are used to other engines/shaders, a lot of shaders i've seen are pretty terrible, and the specular maxes at 1 or 100% or whatever you want to call it, which is just retarded, and isnt really very useful for shiney materials. You would have to have a totally white image to get full specularity in this case, which is pretty useless. Toolbag's specular intensity is a lot higher by default as well, which means a value of 1 = REALLY REALLY BRIGHT.
A good rule of thumb with specular maps, is to use the full range of hte image, its a bad idea to have a very dark spec map, as it will compress very poorly and have banding artifacts from the low precision(if you're only using the bottom 10%, you only have so may colors to represent the values). Instead, you want to have a very contrasted spec map instead, and just set the intensity really low.
Another thing to take into consideration is "specular sharpness", this is essecially the glossyness of the specular, or blurry/sharpness. Its a little wierd how it works, 0 = the sharpest, and then about 10 = the blurriest, and the higher the value, the sharper it will get. 0 is actually using the full resolution cube map, while all other values are much lower res.
Most of this is covered in the tutorial.txt, which i suggest you read.
-.- I'm just tired right now. I got my model in with a skin shader. So uhm, about the normal mapping section - it dosent allow compressed TGA's. Anyone please help me on how I can fix this?
Make sure "compress TGA" or whatever isnt enabled when you save from photoshop?
Or are you talking compression in the viewer? I think compression may be pretty broke, i wouldn't turn it on.
Hey guys need a bit of help on normals. I got normals working for a model but I have a rock type thing with a texture Im trying to get in now. I done the exact same - Save obj file (texture cordinates checked) saved out the normals as an uncompressed targa and the diffuse. When I load it in I get the normals but looking as if they do not have co-ordinates but it worked for the first model I had normal mapped. Any help?
Chaos, post a screenshot and it might be a little easier to help you.
I'm absolutely loving this thing. I really like how it renders normals and spec and the post effects are great, even if I don't use them too much. I've been using it a lot with my Dominance War entry:
The problem here is that you do not have a material applied.
try this:
Save mat as, dicks.mat or whatever
Then dicks.mat should show up in your material list, select it
Then click "apply selected material"
and finally, "save mesh & materials"
Now you will have a valid material, and you can plug in your diff/spec/normals/etc
[edit] IGNORE THAT
The problem is you are missing a diffuse map, you always must have at minimum a diffuse and normal map. The diffuse can be a flat grey texture, it doesnt matter.
Replies
Could you upload your files?
I didn't include the textures for the balloon top.
[edit] you seem to be getting stranger issues than i am here, but for certain you need to flip the green channel.
Take some time and read through the tutorial.txt file and make sure you're not doing anything weird, make sure your model is nested inside /base/ as well.
You've also got some minor seams and smoothing errors in your normal map, most likely from using a NM rendered in max. If you load up a flat grey texture for the diffuse/spec it will be easy to see. Best solution here would be to render in xnormal, with OBJ or better yet .mesh format(save out your bake mesh in toolbag as .mesh, and load it in Xnormal using the "stooge" file format).
The AO seems to be quite nice, but idk about normals... my projection kept missing. Even after trying quite low and very high distances it didn't really seem to help.
Edit: Ya, the green flipping fixed it
I can't seem to get this to work, every time I load up the edited .mat it doesn't show anything in the channel model slot, and when I click on it and try to scroll through the model list it crashes. I've tried different text editors, shaders of varying complexity, different textures but nothing seems to work. As far as I can tell all it's successfully reading from the .mat file is the physical material property. Halp!
Did you set up a cage? There's a tutorial on the xnormal page if you're not sure how to do it. You could also try breaking your mesh into a pieces and baking them individually.
Theres generally the 2 different methods, max and maya, marmoset uses the maya standard and the only difference is the green channel is fliped. Every engine/shader will use one or the other.
As was stated there is no UI for the material. So you just have to create a material, and edit all of the paramaters by hand in notepad. You wont be able to change any settings realtime because there isnt a UI for it. So trying to change channel mode will crash. Just apply the material to your mesh. Also, post your materail here, because there may be some missing information you need to add as well.
When i'm working with glass stuff, i have a little hack-workaround. what i do is i'll set up the file in notepad, and then i'll create an additional "dummy" material that references all the textures, then as i edit hte textures in PS, i can go to my dummy material and reload them.
Maya 7, 8, and 9(2008) are all that is currently supported.
I'm quickly getting the hang of this tool and my questions keep adding up! Here's a couple more!
- Are there any other shader goodies we can activate by hacking the material? Falloff? Translucency? Animated Textures? etc..
- Along the same question, can we activate 2sidedness that same way?
- I'm having a hard time making 2 sided alphas for some furry planes in my model. if i just duplicate the planes and flip the normals (as is the usual workaround in engines), i get a lot of shadow artifacts showing on the wrong side, even if i put some distance between them. How should i go about making 2sided alpha planes without getting shadow issues?
My model's almost done i'll be sure to post a shot here if i can get around that issue
You can do 2-sided materials by turning off "use culling" in the material. This isnt really a good solution tho because;
1. The lighting is incorrect on one side
2. The shadows get all screwed up
The best thing to do is simply duplicate and flip your geometry.
Oh wait you're getting issues with that too, oh well in that case try turning off shadow casting entirely for just the planes(use a separate material).
What I've been doing is taking one screenshot with and one without shadows and just shopping out the problem area. But i mean i couldn't do a turnaround movie that way. Please do keep us posted on developments on the 2sided front.
Right now the viewer has a lot if little quirks such as that, which i look forward to seeing resolved (hope more builds are to come)! Then this thing could become a real solid tool for quick-draw engine-style viewing/rendering. for now it feels "Oooo, Almost there" keep it up!
ps: are you guys interested in people posting suggestions for features and fixes in this thread? Cuz i have a little list building up as i use it.
MadeOf Wood ComplexRefraction { BlendMode Alpha DiffuseMap projects/vending machine/glass_diffuse.tga NormalMap projects/vending machine/glass_normals.tga SpecularMap projects/vending machine/glass_spec.tga UseSpecular SpecularExponent 3.95933 SpecularColor 0.497975 0.497975 0.497975 SpecularIntensity 1.01494 Fresnel 0.0276454 }That's the material I'm using. The strange thing is, when I apply it to the glass mesh the only change I see is that it starts using the normal map from the mesh/material underneath it. Very weird.
The dummy material (nice trick btw) works fine, though.
Always good to hear feedback, but i dont think the programmers really have any time that they're able to dedicate to the app other than serious bug fixes, atleast in the short term.
emmisive and reflection maps would have been the peak, but i guess the greater bit counts
After using it for a week or two, here's a short list of things i'm aching for :
- Fix shadow issues when trying to get something 2 sided
- 2 sided materials
- RGB input for the colour selection dialogs
- Autospin the model in the same way you can with the environment (for making video turnarounds).
- Make navigation center on the model instead of wherever it is by default for the first few movements.
- (Unless i missed something) It would be nice to load image maps directly in the sky tab, instead of need to load that special scene format. I couldn't figure out how to make that format out of new images i brought into the environment editor.
I think that's everything i can think of for now! :P
Nice model.
There's a 'center mesh' button on the 'file' tab that I've been finding rather useful at times.
There's also a writeup earlier in the thread on making those .env files.
Before you let it crash(hit ok in windows or whatever) look in the console and see if it has any errors listed there. Othere than that, make sure your OBJ exporter is set up correctly(exporting UVs, normals, etc).
If i leave the tool running for a couple hours as i go back and forth between max photoshop and the viewer, suddenly it starts lagging my computer TERRIBLY.
I'm talking no input response for 1 minute, then 1 second of control, then 2 minutes of no control, 30 seconds of control, then 3 minutes of no control again. So on and so forth until my machine is completely deadlocked! There's no way to close the program with the extremely limited control time when it happens.
I'm 100% sure that the viewer is at least part of the cause of this slowdown because it only happens while i have it open. It happened once while max and PS were open, and once while just PS was open. I use an intuos 3 for input just for information's sake.
I couldn't tell you what the problem could be but this should definitely be brought to the attention of programmers. My machine can Zbrush up to 11million polys in one mesh without breaking a sweat, so it's definitely not my machine being too weak for this simple viewer.
Anyone else had tremendous slowdown if not complete lock up while using it?
Sounds like a memory leak of some sort. Does it do this every time you leave it on for that long?
Now i just close it when i know i'm alt tabbing to photoshop for a long while, or leaving the PC.
I'm using max 9 to export the .OBJ and no matter what i do... i get that.
any suggestions?
i turned off compression and it's the same KIND of mess.. not sure if it IS the same mess.
Great work on the engine btw guys!
I still can't uderstand what toolbag is doing whit specular- i mean is there any way to regulate the power of specularity?
I checked vahl jedi model and there we got standard setup: color, normal , and specular maps. The last one is very dark and the specularity on model is very subtle and nice.
But on my model the specularity is waaay too strong and even after i copied the vahl's material, i made specularity map almost black, and i didn't help...
Is there somthing i am missing of what?
Specular Intensity slider, just below where you plugged in your spec map. Think of the spec map as deciding the relative spec intensities of your materials (ie. your metal is 3X stronger than your rubber, because it's at ~0.9 brightness while your rubber is ~0.3) and the slider determines the overall specular intensity (ie. how bright are '0' and '1' brightness values).
Its hard to find my model in 3D space - Its in wire frame - and when I try to open a new mat I save it and it closes.
There are multiple ways to control specular intensity.
1. You can use an image to dictate intensity and color
2. You can also tweak the specular color, if you have no specular image, this is your specular value, if you do have an image this color value will multiply your image.
3. You can use specular intensity to multiply both your image, and color.
So if you notice the specular is too high, just set the specular intensity to 0.25, or whatever value feels right. Really one could argue there are toooo many ways adjust specular strength as it is.
One thing that may be throwing you off tho, if you are used to other engines/shaders, a lot of shaders i've seen are pretty terrible, and the specular maxes at 1 or 100% or whatever you want to call it, which is just retarded, and isnt really very useful for shiney materials. You would have to have a totally white image to get full specularity in this case, which is pretty useless. Toolbag's specular intensity is a lot higher by default as well, which means a value of 1 = REALLY REALLY BRIGHT.
A good rule of thumb with specular maps, is to use the full range of hte image, its a bad idea to have a very dark spec map, as it will compress very poorly and have banding artifacts from the low precision(if you're only using the bottom 10%, you only have so may colors to represent the values). Instead, you want to have a very contrasted spec map instead, and just set the intensity really low.
Another thing to take into consideration is "specular sharpness", this is essecially the glossyness of the specular, or blurry/sharpness. Its a little wierd how it works, 0 = the sharpest, and then about 10 = the blurriest, and the higher the value, the sharper it will get. 0 is actually using the full resolution cube map, while all other values are much lower res.
Most of this is covered in the tutorial.txt, which i suggest you read.
no u sux
check between the keyboard and your chair, there may be an issue there
Or are you talking compression in the viewer? I think compression may be pretty broke, i wouldn't turn it on.
I'm absolutely loving this thing. I really like how it renders normals and spec and the post effects are great, even if I don't use them too much. I've been using it a lot with my Dominance War entry:
I done the exact same procedure expectd the last model worked. Looks as if the texture coords arent on.
try this:
Save mat as, dicks.mat or whatever
Then dicks.mat should show up in your material list, select it
Then click "apply selected material"
and finally, "save mesh & materials"
Now you will have a valid material, and you can plug in your diff/spec/normals/etc
[edit] IGNORE THAT
The problem is you are missing a diffuse map, you always must have at minimum a diffuse and normal map. The diffuse can be a flat grey texture, it doesnt matter.