Marmoset Toolbag 1.10 Official support thread
polycounter lvl 11
After last year's positive reception to 8monkey's release of Toolbag, we've decided to make some major additions and updates. Behold, version 1.0:
http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag
For those of you who don't know, Toolbag is a realtime material editor and presentation tool, based on our Marmoset engine. It's a quick way to preview your work in a realtime engine (and we do mean quick). We think you'll find it presents your work in a most flattering way. v1.0 has several new features not present in the previous release, most notably:
* Dynamic light creation and editing
* Saveable scene files (save all your toolbag settings)
* Several new sky lighting presets
* Expanded post effects, including SSAO, DOF, and vignette
* Improved light and shadow accuracy and detail
* Expanded material options, including gloss maps and translucency
* New debug & compositing render modes, preview options
* Greatly improved and reorganized user interface
* A bit of stank on it
And that's just the stuff we can remember. The trial version is a free download so by all means everyone go check it out post-haste. We think you'll like it.
polycount is getting the early heads up here, you guys are the first to hear about this. If there are any troubles with the thing let us know at support@marmoset.co or on this thread.
- The 8monkey Team
http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag
For those of you who don't know, Toolbag is a realtime material editor and presentation tool, based on our Marmoset engine. It's a quick way to preview your work in a realtime engine (and we do mean quick). We think you'll find it presents your work in a most flattering way. v1.0 has several new features not present in the previous release, most notably:
* Dynamic light creation and editing
* Saveable scene files (save all your toolbag settings)
* Several new sky lighting presets
* Expanded post effects, including SSAO, DOF, and vignette
* Improved light and shadow accuracy and detail
* Expanded material options, including gloss maps and translucency
* New debug & compositing render modes, preview options
* Greatly improved and reorganized user interface
* A bit of stank on it
And that's just the stuff we can remember. The trial version is a free download so by all means everyone go check it out post-haste. We think you'll like it.
polycount is getting the early heads up here, you guys are the first to hear about this. If there are any troubles with the thing let us know at support@marmoset.co or on this thread.
- The 8monkey Team
Replies
Likely a small percentage, Marmoset rivals the UDK in terms of render popularity on this forum I think.
edit: and rightfully so, shit's pretty.
Thanks MoP ;-)
Why the expiration on the watermarked version?
Let me just clarify that yes, the model viewer is awesome, produces fantastic results (even on my crap), and I appreciate that a lot of people worked hard on it. But I'm curious as to why an individual would pay $50 for a model viewer/presentation tool, when UDK / Xoliul's shader does the same thing for free. Admittedly some stuff does look nicer in Marmoset, but whether it looks $50 nicer, I'm not sure.
I mean yeah, for volume licenses, or unmarked versions then a $50 one time seems realistic, but to limit the use of the watermarked version to 20 days seems like an odd decision.
http://www.3pointstudios.com/3pointshader_purchase.shtml
Yeah I guess, although the free version of 3Point doesn't expire.
I dunno why but I always assumed a lot of the guys from 3 Point were also involved in 8Monkey Labs too...
Frell, You're so dramatic, I like it.
But seriously we weighed a bunch of options for the free/lite/trial version, and we came up with this. We feel with all the work we've been putting into the tool a little love needs to come back to us. We were drunk, or something, I dunno. If everyone truly hates the current evaluation setup then maybe we'll reconsider, but not yet.
And as far as the old version, well it's not really supported by 8monkey. Actually, it was never really supported by 8monkey.
The new version does support glow/emmissive maps, among many other things.
And yea we know some of the 3point guys and have worked with them, but we're not the same studio.
Id love to know if 8Monkey are using this renderer/shading system in production or if its just a pimped out setup for previews
Frel: Dont be a plonker, next to the price of all the other tools a 3D artist uses everyday this is peanuts. Especially considering how important good presentation is.
Is the pay version Node locked or can you install it on multiple systems, using only 1 at a time.
But to each his own.
Pay version is node locked, but we provide a tool to switch the license between machines if you need to.
...then I actually opened it up and played with it... And I will admit it. You guys REALLY deserve the money for it. You've figured out how to make an awesome product even more awesome. The new interface is great, I love adding new lights.. I love all the new options. I'm gonna use up the free trial..and probably gonna force myself to drop the money to buy it. I applaud! Thanks again, guys.
I have one remark tough, i use d1save script for photoshop to save multiple tga maps from one psd with layergroups. And by default it saves with compress (rle) on.
Apparently, toolbag doesn't suport compress (rle) option in tga files, and it's kind of a bother to uncheck that everytime you save. manualy
Oh and i saw the psd support, pretty cool too, but if your file is kinda heavy it's slow to see the result, tga is way better combined with auto reload texture on..
[EDIT] I edited the script so it works now, but it would be kind in to have toolbag support it in a next version, just to avoid that kinda worries.
For those who have the same problem: edit d1vSaveTGA.jsx and add "tgaSaveOptions.rleCompression = false" (without quotes) after the "tgaSaveOptions.alphaChannels = false" line
edit: saw the post, it already does
the lights are great and easy to setup. love it, love it, love it. more than worth the money for the hard work IMO. great job.
The desired area is lit when it's dark, but it doesn't actually produce that glow fog/halo around it. I can up the bloom to get the effect but then I also get it in unwanted areas.
Will buy it when I get some cash :P
Great job guys!
-PSD's take a little bit to load, but it seems like it works well.
-Dynamic lights! I can finally add a rimlight to compliment the ambient lighting.
-GLOSS YES YES YES
-The new cubemaps are great! Riverside ambience is really, really good. It seems to be missing some of the old ones, though.
-Bloom is finally nice and smooth. No more choppies,
I take it back about the price, I just downloaded the trial and suddenly the $50 became irrelevant! Very very cool.
I strongly suggest anyone who is unsure to give it a try.
Now I just wanna model guns though
I'm actually redoing my portfolio right now and I'm excited to get some new renders done of old models using this new version.
I'm wondering this too.
I'm assuming it's pretty tricky to achieve in shader language (although I know absolutely nothing about shader language) as I think Xoliul was saying the 'glow' is kinda a post-effect that's usually handled by the engine rather than the shader whereas the shader emissive just controls the amount of SI.
Some details on how the emissive is rendered vis a vis bloom. Since bloom is part of the post effects pipe, it uses the full color render result as input (any pixel can bloom). Some engines use the emissive channel as the sole input to the bloom function and that would give the kind of control over the effect that I think some of you are after (but you would lose bloom on brightly lit surfaces or spec highlights). For better or worse, marmoset doesn't work that way.
What you can do, however, is what Racer suggested and mess with the bloom settings in the render tab. Of particular importance is the bloom gamma, which is an exponent applied to the color signal input for the bloom. Higher numbers here will "tighten" the bloom to just the brightest spots of the image.
Edit: another idea. You can take separate shots of the emissive channel and diffuse/specular, and composite them in photoshop however you like (see the Render>View menu) . A bit of a hassle but would give you a lot of control on how things are composited.
What are your system specs? Are your graphics drivers up to date? I'm running vista 64 and I'm one of the guys who wrote the blasted thing so it should work.
Anyone encountered anything similar?
One question here: I didn't find any slider to change the skylight(IBL) intensity. Do we have this kind of function?
@mod: known bug, the FOV slider control seems to break the light selection and manipulation, as you describe. Setting the FOV to exactly 60 degrees is a workaround for now, this will be fixed in future builds.
@snow: We saw some artifacts on the Radeon 5000 series as well, but this was for the old shadow algorithm. The new version might give you better results. If it doesn't, or if there are still artifacts, let us know.
@Aaron_Fang: Skylight exposure slider is a good idea, I think we missed that one. If you're game for it you can edit exposures in the .env files manually (base/sky/*) if you'd like to change exposures on the light. But the slider is another easy change that we'll throw in the next update.
Is there some documentation available? It's a pretty straight forward viewer, but there are some things that I'm not sure how to tweak. I'm having trouble getting the anisotropic shader to look the way I expect it to, and I figure it probably requires a direction map, but I'm not sure how to create one or what kind Toolbag expects to see. I can tell what most of the settings are doing just by testing them out, but I would also love to have abbreviated descriptions somewhere to better understand how to properly tweak them.
*EDIT: sorry, I'm an idiot. I see the documentation now, though I would still be grateful for more detailed information.
I wish we had access to some of the shader functions such as being able to adjust the color of the SSS effect on the SkinEnvironment.
The depth of field effect is nice. It would be great if we could set a focus mark on the model and then have Auto Focus be a toggle so that it would continually set the focus distance for you as you zoom in/out.
Thanks for releasing this. I'll probably get a full license of it soon.