Chaosv49 - maybe check if normals arent messed up. An if you are using blender make sure that during exporting the normals option is ticked.
EQ,Glip- Blah i am stupid... Thank you guys and sorry for that stupid question.
Now i ve got problem with alpha blending- the tutorial.txt says:
2. In maya, make sure your alpha blended chunk was the last chunk created/edited, otherwise it will draw in the wrong order. Do not ask how or why this works, it is voodoo magic.
As i do not own maya i am using the blender .obj exporter. The deal is that i want to make that Eye tricky specular thing (similar to one from the Aayla Secura-EyeShell.mat that is). The Eye trick thing is the last thing i modeled,edited, it is the last thing i marked during the selection before exporting, but it does not help.
Either i am stupid again or the obj importer in Toolbag/Blender exporter have some glitches....
The normals are not screwed up as on my 3DSMAX model it has the same layout and it works fine. Can I just say that suggesting I have blender is quite and insult to me in some ways : P I have the full version of 3dsmax, Zbursh and Photoshop. BLENDER sucks
Open max file, save simple sphere test as Obj, open normals in photoshop and save in folder as targa uncompressed, open tool bag, import obj file, put on material that gives normal map section, apply and...
The normals are working but if you look at the top right of my screenshot its taking the sort of coordinates of the normals..you know?
Open max file, OBJ save, open normals in PS and save as uncompressed targa, open toolbag material editor, import OBJ which works fine, put on a mat that supports normal maps, put it on and..
it looks like the normals are working but.. with the incorrect coords.. if you look at my screen on the Photoshop part its like its using that instead of the coords or something
Chaosv59- I think that sometimes users suck more than apps.
EQ- I assumed that you were writing to me so i was preparing the files(translating names from polish to English:P) and when i went to Toolbag -big surprise- it worked! Looks like the 'Voodoo magic' have something to do with blender layers. I will make few more test to make sure what was causing the problem and ill post it here. Big thanks for proposition because without it i would never import this in Toolbag again:P.
Chaosv59- I think that sometimes users suck more than apps.
EQ- I assumed that you were writing to me so i was preparing the files(translating names from polish to English:P) and when i went to Toolbag -big surprise- it worked! Looks like the 'Voodoo magic' have something to do with blender layers. I will make few more test to make sure what was causing the problem and ill post it here. Big thanks for proposition because without it i would never import this in Toolbag again:P.
Yeah really there is no predictable way to do this. Maybe someone with enough smarts could manually edit the obj. I only know how to do it in maya, so good luck.
Oh sorry for wrong typing. And that sentence about insults, i will write it down somewhere.
But let's think about for a moment. It is not about insulting or something, but you posting here:Toolbag sucks, Blender sucks, and Iown those super, cool apps. From what you have wrote here one can assume that you think that if something is going wrong it the app fault not yours. And that is not always true. On the other hand we are not magicians - i was assuming that it is something wrong about the normals and it just was guessing. I think if you really want to get clear answer you should do what EQ asked me to do - post your obj and textures here.
And if you want another guess- are you sure that UVs are not messed up?
Open max file, OBJ save, open normals in PS and save as uncompressed targa, open toolbag material editor, import OBJ which works fine, put on a mat that supports normal maps, put it on and..
it looks like the normals are working but.. with the incorrect coords.. if you look at my screen on the Photoshop part its like its using that instead of the coords or something
Do you have multiple UV cords? If so the OBJ may be exporting the incorrect one, or the incorrect one is getting loaded as the default channel.
Upload your OBJ/Textures and i'll take a look at it.
Your object's UVs do not match your unwrap. Your object appears to be using a default unwrap (flattened out, one seam from pole to pole, sawtooth cuts at the top and bottom of the map from where the mesh meets at the poles). Marmoset is displaying this the same way that max/maya/anything else would.
Okay that's weird dude... look at my screen thats what mines looks like.
Did yours come with any modifiers or anything? Mines looks like it does the in the last screen I took
EDIT : I switched it to chanell 1 and it looks the same now but thats not really the thing I'm wanting as I have normals on the auto unwrap channel 3.
When dealing with obj, its is common sense to not just look at your original max file and scream it's right - instead, make a new scene and import the obj back in to check it out, or even better, import it in another program or in a 3D viewer like 3Dexploration. This way you will know for sure what other artists will see when opening your file.
Also it is considered offensive to just post a picture without any explanation, like you did multiple times here. It reads as 'fuck you guys, here's what I have, see, I'm right'. Please take the time to explain why you posted the picture, describe what the problem is and so on.
Yes the Toolbag ain't perfect but this kind of issues are commonplace when it comes to any engine exporter/pipeline (when a tool works good enough, there is often no time to fix it further since ther eis more urgent stuff on the shelf of the tool guy. Expecially since we are talking internal tools here, not retail apps). You have to learn to live with that stuff (and also learn how to report the issues as precisely as possible) if you want to go further in a game career!
Like you can't just say "hey my unwrap is on channel 3 but I want it on channel 1 it sucks". You have to google or F1 on how to copy paste channels. Or ask nicely here.
(it's extremely easy in Max anyways, since you can save/load UV channels as a file)
I completley understand you Prior. About the picture thing: I wanted to get the stuff out quick as I was busy IRL. I realise it did seem quite rude now. I feel like such a noob because I've been using max for around 2 years (on and off mind you as I used to play alot of games and I was younger) Thanks anyway.
Pior is a man of many patients and wisdoms. Boy i sure do wish he would actually model something and put it in toolbag like he said he was going to, oh i dont know... YEARS AGO
O hai guise, I just tested a new model I'm working on with the toolbag, and I'm encountering a small problem: The more I zoom out of the model, the more the eyes bug out and seem as if they're sticking out of the sockets.
I haven't tried exporting to .mesh yet, so I'm just using the model as an obj file exporter from Max with the gwobj exporter. I'm gonna try exporting from Maya tomorrow and see if there's any difference.
Oh by the way, I love how it renders the model and I didn't see any seams while rotating the light around the head. (I could see those seams in xNormal)
Anyway, great job and thanks for putting this out for the community! Hope the engine is a huge success!
edit/ btw, these are my normals:
I haven't baked the eyes yet, I've just got a neutral normal colour instead... Maybe it has something to do with that? btw the actual map is actually 2048x2048, I scaled it down so that it would be smaller to upload.
/edit 2: I just found out that at FOV 120 this doesn't happen. Also, there's a little bug there (I think): when I right-click anywhere on the screen after messing with the FOV slider, the slider automatically goes to 120.
O hai guise, I just tested a new model I'm working on with the toolbag, and I'm encountering a small problem: The more I zoom out of the model, the more the eyes bug out and seem as if they're sticking out of the sockets.
I haven't tried exporting to .mesh yet, so I'm just using the model as an obj file exporter from Max with the gwobj exporter. I'm gonna try exporting from Maya tomorrow and see if there's any difference.
Oh by the way, I love how it renders the model and I didn't see any seams while rotating the light around the head. (I could see those seams in xNormal)
Anyway, great job and thanks for putting this out for the community! Hope the engine is a huge success!
edit/ btw, these are my normals:
I haven't baked the eyes yet, I've just got a neutral normal colour instead... Maybe it has something to do with that? btw the actual map is actually 2048x2048, I scaled it down so that it would be smaller to upload.
/edit 2: I just found out that at FOV 120 this doesn't happen. Also, there's a little bug there (I think): when I right-click anywhere on the screen after messing with the FOV slider, the slider automatically goes to 120.
This is zfighting, due to having the eye too close to the eyelids, theres nothing you can do about it other than make that area thicker.
You're probably talking about the lines in his forehead, right? The normal map's fine I think, it's just the ao map. It's unedited and straight out of xNormal and there's just a lot of white in there. I'll check with a solid grey material to make sure though.
for character stuff i tend to use a FOV of 30-45, going over 45 tends to give a really distorted look, well atleast with female characters i've noticed. i dont remember if that will help or worsen the z-fighint issue tho.
As an aside, that's one feature it would be nice to have is to see that in terms of lense length as well as FOV like max/maya lets you do. I think better in terms of 50mm lense, 100mm lense, 18mm lense etc... I ended up going into max and making myself a cheat sheet so I knew what ballpark FOV values to use.
It would also be nice to have an orthographic option, and for FOV to not affect z-fighting and shadow quality. The first one just needs to have clipping ranges change with FOV, and the second one... well I'm not sure. The camera needs to be further away to frame the same size object when you have a tight FOV, and the shadow quality is based on camera distance. I'm not sure how that could be fixed, but it's somewhat annoying that the more fisheye your lense is, the better the shadows are.
Oh, and for general information, I believe the human eye sees things at about an 80mm lense from 15 ft away, which is why characters look weird with wider FOV's.
for character stuff i tend to use a FOV of 30-45, going over 45 tends to give a really distorted look, well atleast with female characters i've noticed. i dont remember if that will help or worsen the z-fighint issue tho.
Yeah that's the thing, it gets pretty bad lower than ~60 (the zfighting issue). I tried moving the eyes around but this hasn't worked either, dunno if it'll get better when I put proper normal maps (and not the solid purple colour) on the eyes.... Will have to try it out and see, I guess :P
ok pretty sure this was addressed somewhere, but I cant seem to find it
Wanted to test marmoset out a little, so i grabbed my level 1 from zbrush and baked some quick normals of my DW entry and I'm getting some weird normal errors. (not the errors all over, those are just from a shitty bake :P)
On his "waist arm" im getting inverted lighting or something strange. It's sharing uv space with the opposite arm and not offset. The other two arms are setup the same way are working fine though.
I just fixed the "problem" on my model: it was exported as too large (in feet) and it was because of that. Now that I scaled it really really down, it's fucking awesome. Pure win!
ok pretty sure this was addressed somewhere, but I cant seem to find it
Wanted to test marmoset out a little, so i grabbed my level 1 from zbrush and baked some quick normals of my DW entry and I'm getting some weird normal errors. (not the errors all over, those are just from a shitty bake :P)
On his "waist arm" im getting inverted lighting or something strange. It's sharing uv space with the opposite arm and not offset. The other two arms are setup the same way are working fine though.
pic:
Hey cool mesh, try importing your obj into max/maya and checking the normals, could be something could be wrong, normals facing hte wrong direction or something.
It was mentioned that I need to have seperate meshes to get alphas to display properly, or am I misunderstand? When I tried this, I got the same result. Let me show you the issue.
I am currently in the process of texturing a car, and since Maya has trouble with alpha's, I wanted to use marmoset toolbag to help me instead.
Marmoset is not displaying my alpha properly on only a certain part of the mesh.
I want the windows to be semi transparent. I have .tga diffuse map with an alpha channel, which is currently set to be fully transparent on the windows. As you can see, the windows are indeed transparent, but only to the background. I need to be able to see inside the car. Why is it doing this?
To add to the confusion. I tried painting alpha on other parts of the uv. When I do this the alpha actually displays perfectly (apart from the windows). I can see through where ever I painted, just as you would expect. I do not understand why only the windows will not render properly.
The windows are single poly planes, which the normals facing outwards. To note, I have also tried having boxes for the windows and I get the same effect. I have checked over the mesh numerous times and can not find anything wrong with it. (apart from my bad modelling skills :P )
I have tried playing with the alpha threshhold (I do not understand what it does however) and after a certain value, the windows do go transparent. I tried this with 50% gray and tweaking the threshhold still makes the windows just disappear.
I have tried the other blending modes but they are giving completely different results to what I want.
The alpha support as it is isnt very good, and no matter what you do, you wont be able to view one alpha'd plane behind another.
Now, one thing you can do, is create a separate mesh chunk for the alpha material, and make sure that chunk was the last edited in maya. As the tutorial.txt goes over.
Now, one thing you can do, is create a separate mesh chunk for the alpha material, and make sure that chunk was the last edited in maya. As the tutorial.txt goes over.
Also, merging this with the other thread.
What do you mean by mesh chunk? I took this to mean seperate mesh, which I did try but had the same result
Thank you for moving my post. My appologises for not posting in the correct place.
Yeah separate mesh, like i wrote in the tutorial, its pretty much voodoo magic to get it to work right. Are you using obj from maya or the stooge exporter?
hi EarthQuake, my maya 8.5 crash after i copied the marmoset stooge exporter to the plugins folder, and can't be open anymore, even after i delete the stooge exporter file, do you know what happen? or should i try it with maya 2009? really appreciate your help
As I am playing around with toolbag i wonder if 8mokeylabs is going to develop this(for example add glowmaps, or fix te issues with alpha maps) or the hole Toolbag releasing was a one time gift for us and we should not expect anything more?
hi EarthQuake, my maya 8.5 crash after i copied the marmoset stooge exporter to the plugins folder, and can't be open anymore, even after i delete the stooge exporter file, do you know what happen? or should i try it with maya 2009? really appreciate your help
I think the plugin only works with maya 7, 8 or 9(2008). I have no idea why you would be having problems after removing the plugin, i would imagine it doesnt have anything to do with the plugin if that is the case but who knows. I think if you try to use the plugin with the wrong version it just wont work, but it may cause crashes etc too, dunno
It was mentioned that I need to have seperate meshes to get alphas to display properly, or am I misunderstand? When I tried this, I got the same result. Let me show you the issue.
I am currently in the process of texturing a car, and since Maya has trouble with alpha's, I wanted to use marmoset toolbag to help me instead.
Marmoset is not displaying my alpha properly on only a certain part of the mesh.
I want the windows to be semi transparent. I have .tga diffuse map with an alpha channel, which is currently set to be fully transparent on the windows. As you can see, the windows are indeed transparent, but only to the background. I need to be able to see inside the car. Why is it doing this?
To add to the confusion. I tried painting alpha on other parts of the uv. When I do this the alpha actually displays perfectly (apart from the windows). I can see through where ever I painted, just as you would expect. I do not understand why only the windows will not render properly.
The windows are single poly planes, which the normals facing outwards. To note, I have also tried having boxes for the windows and I get the same effect. I have checked over the mesh numerous times and can not find anything wrong with it. (apart from my bad modelling skills :P )
I have tried playing with the alpha threshhold (I do not understand what it does however) and after a certain value, the windows do go transparent. I tried this with 50% gray and tweaking the threshhold still makes the windows just disappear.
I have tried the other blending modes but they are giving completely different results to what I want.
I hope someone can help me, thanks all.
If you have further problems, make sure your objects are actually inheriting their pivots. I had to place some thing under a null objects to get it working properly.
Replies
EQ,Glip- Blah i am stupid... Thank you guys and sorry for that stupid question.
Now i ve got problem with alpha blending- the tutorial.txt says: As i do not own maya i am using the blender .obj exporter. The deal is that i want to make that Eye tricky specular thing (similar to one from the Aayla Secura-EyeShell.mat that is). The Eye trick thing is the last thing i modeled,edited, it is the last thing i marked during the selection before exporting, but it does not help.
Either i am stupid again or the obj importer in Toolbag/Blender exporter have some glitches....
The normals are working but if you look at the top right of my screenshot its taking the sort of coordinates of the normals..you know?
it looks like the normals are working but.. with the incorrect coords.. if you look at my screen on the Photoshop part its like its using that instead of the coords or something
EQ- I assumed that you were writing to me so i was preparing the files(translating names from polish to English:P) and when i went to Toolbag -big surprise- it worked! Looks like the 'Voodoo magic' have something to do with blender layers. I will make few more test to make sure what was causing the problem and ill post it here. Big thanks for proposition because without it i would never import this in Toolbag again:P.
1) Crappy insult. If you're gonna make an insult - make it good.
2) Could atleast help - I thot I was doing the right thing.
Edit : 3) It's V49.
Yeah really there is no predictable way to do this. Maybe someone with enough smarts could manually edit the obj. I only know how to do it in maya, so good luck.
But let's think about for a moment. It is not about insulting or something, but you posting here:Toolbag sucks, Blender sucks, and Iown those super, cool apps. From what you have wrote here one can assume that you think that if something is going wrong it the app fault not yours. And that is not always true. On the other hand we are not magicians - i was assuming that it is something wrong about the normals and it just was guessing. I think if you really want to get clear answer you should do what EQ asked me to do - post your obj and textures here.
And if you want another guess- are you sure that UVs are not messed up?
Peace.
EarthQuake- Thanks again!
Do you have multiple UV cords? If so the OBJ may be exporting the incorrect one, or the incorrect one is getting loaded as the default channel.
Upload your OBJ/Textures and i'll take a look at it.
Its just a random sphere and a really bad zbrush messy thing to test.
http://rapidshare.com/files/220929353/Test_stuff.zip.html
Your object's UVs do not match your unwrap. Your object appears to be using a default unwrap (flattened out, one seam from pole to pole, sawtooth cuts at the top and bottom of the map from where the mesh meets at the poles). Marmoset is displaying this the same way that max/maya/anything else would.
Did yours come with any modifiers or anything? Mines looks like it does the in the last screen I took
EDIT : I switched it to chanell 1 and it looks the same now but thats not really the thing I'm wanting as I have normals on the auto unwrap channel 3.
When dealing with obj, its is common sense to not just look at your original max file and scream it's right - instead, make a new scene and import the obj back in to check it out, or even better, import it in another program or in a 3D viewer like 3Dexploration. This way you will know for sure what other artists will see when opening your file.
Also it is considered offensive to just post a picture without any explanation, like you did multiple times here. It reads as 'fuck you guys, here's what I have, see, I'm right'. Please take the time to explain why you posted the picture, describe what the problem is and so on.
Yes the Toolbag ain't perfect but this kind of issues are commonplace when it comes to any engine exporter/pipeline (when a tool works good enough, there is often no time to fix it further since ther eis more urgent stuff on the shelf of the tool guy. Expecially since we are talking internal tools here, not retail apps). You have to learn to live with that stuff (and also learn how to report the issues as precisely as possible) if you want to go further in a game career!
Like you can't just say "hey my unwrap is on channel 3 but I want it on channel 1 it sucks". You have to google or F1 on how to copy paste channels. Or ask nicely here.
(it's extremely easy in Max anyways, since you can save/load UV channels as a file)
Good luck, chill out, be patient.
I am actually waiting for ANOTHER beta app haha
Still harassing the coder, so maybe one day!
I haven't tried exporting to .mesh yet, so I'm just using the model as an obj file exporter from Max with the gwobj exporter. I'm gonna try exporting from Maya tomorrow and see if there's any difference.
Oh by the way, I love how it renders the model and I didn't see any seams while rotating the light around the head. (I could see those seams in xNormal)
Anyway, great job and thanks for putting this out for the community! Hope the engine is a huge success!
edit/ btw, these are my normals:
I haven't baked the eyes yet, I've just got a neutral normal colour instead... Maybe it has something to do with that? btw the actual map is actually 2048x2048, I scaled it down so that it would be smaller to upload.
/edit 2: I just found out that at FOV 120 this doesn't happen. Also, there's a little bug there (I think): when I right-click anywhere on the screen after messing with the FOV slider, the slider automatically goes to 120.
bump!
oh, and how is this thread still not stickied?
This is zfighting, due to having the eye too close to the eyelids, theres nothing you can do about it other than make that area thicker.
You're probably talking about the lines in his forehead, right? The normal map's fine I think, it's just the ao map. It's unedited and straight out of xNormal and there's just a lot of white in there. I'll check with a solid grey material to make sure though.
Ah, ok. Do you think I'll have to just move polies around or add new ones?
It would also be nice to have an orthographic option, and for FOV to not affect z-fighting and shadow quality. The first one just needs to have clipping ranges change with FOV, and the second one... well I'm not sure. The camera needs to be further away to frame the same size object when you have a tight FOV, and the shadow quality is based on camera distance. I'm not sure how that could be fixed, but it's somewhat annoying that the more fisheye your lense is, the better the shadows are.
Oh, and for general information, I believe the human eye sees things at about an 80mm lense from 15 ft away, which is why characters look weird with wider FOV's.
Yeah, at 120 the eyes look perfect, but the lower you get it gets worse.
Yeah that's the thing, it gets pretty bad lower than ~60 (the zfighting issue). I tried moving the eyes around but this hasn't worked either, dunno if it'll get better when I put proper normal maps (and not the solid purple colour) on the eyes.... Will have to try it out and see, I guess :P
ok pretty sure this was addressed somewhere, but I cant seem to find it
Wanted to test marmoset out a little, so i grabbed my level 1 from zbrush and baked some quick normals of my DW entry and I'm getting some weird normal errors. (not the errors all over, those are just from a shitty bake :P)
On his "waist arm" im getting inverted lighting or something strange. It's sharing uv space with the opposite arm and not offset. The other two arms are setup the same way are working fine though.
pic:
Hey cool mesh, try importing your obj into max/maya and checking the normals, could be something could be wrong, normals facing hte wrong direction or something.
turns out it was just because i baked with the secondary arms deleted then copied the primary ones over, rather than offsetting the uvs :P
http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=61548&highlight=marmoset+alpha
It was mentioned that I need to have seperate meshes to get alphas to display properly, or am I misunderstand? When I tried this, I got the same result. Let me show you the issue.
I am currently in the process of texturing a car, and since Maya has trouble with alpha's, I wanted to use marmoset toolbag to help me instead.
Marmoset is not displaying my alpha properly on only a certain part of the mesh.
I want the windows to be semi transparent. I have .tga diffuse map with an alpha channel, which is currently set to be fully transparent on the windows. As you can see, the windows are indeed transparent, but only to the background. I need to be able to see inside the car. Why is it doing this?
To add to the confusion. I tried painting alpha on other parts of the uv. When I do this the alpha actually displays perfectly (apart from the windows). I can see through where ever I painted, just as you would expect. I do not understand why only the windows will not render properly.
The windows are single poly planes, which the normals facing outwards. To note, I have also tried having boxes for the windows and I get the same effect. I have checked over the mesh numerous times and can not find anything wrong with it. (apart from my bad modelling skills :P )
I have tried playing with the alpha threshhold (I do not understand what it does however) and after a certain value, the windows do go transparent. I tried this with 50% gray and tweaking the threshhold still makes the windows just disappear.
I have tried the other blending modes but they are giving completely different results to what I want.
I hope someone can help me, thanks all.
Now, one thing you can do, is create a separate mesh chunk for the alpha material, and make sure that chunk was the last edited in maya. As the tutorial.txt goes over.
Also, merging this with the other thread.
nothing too exciting apart from some gratuitous god rays
What do you mean by mesh chunk? I took this to mean seperate mesh, which I did try but had the same result
Thank you for moving my post. My appologises for not posting in the correct place.
I will have another jab at it tomorrow. In the mean time is there any other way I can have real time alpha for texturing?
Either way, big thanks again! toolbag rocks!
I think the plugin only works with maya 7, 8 or 9(2008). I have no idea why you would be having problems after removing the plugin, i would imagine it doesnt have anything to do with the plugin if that is the case but who knows. I think if you try to use the plugin with the wrong version it just wont work, but it may cause crashes etc too, dunno
If you have further problems, make sure your objects are actually inheriting their pivots. I had to place some thing under a null objects to get it working properly.