I think it's a problem of how marmoset displayes mirrored geometry which shares the same UV space and not the normal map itself.
I had the same issue with a mirrored model and it displayed fine in max and UDK.
Not quite sure what's going on with the seams, but I want to throw in that you can display vertex normals (and various shader debug displays) in toolbag its self to make sure they imported correctly. Take a look at some of that, might shed some light on things?
Yeah, 1.04 has been released and has some nice new features compared to 1.02
I have a problem with both versions tho.. I can only use the Flat Render... the others don't work.. The mesh appears as a flat gray when i try.. I guess that's cause of my notebook. If anyone else had this problem and managed to fix it I would be really grateful for some pointers.
I'm a bit lost here. I did try to google as well but I can't find my answer :
Is there a way to mask (with a map, not per poly/material) a detail map ?
I'm trying to bake a normal from a mesh exported from 3ds Max 2012, with one smoothing group for the entire mesh. Using the exported normals in XNormal gives me some artifacts :
If I use the Average normals option, it's almost perfect :
BUT in both cases when I display the normal map in the Marmoset Toolbag, I get horrible distorsions :
I tried everything, from exporting to OBJ, FBX, changing the normals export options, removing the smoothing groups, baked my normqls in Max, nothing worked... I'm about to go medieval on my keyboard !
This is not a marmoset exclusive problem, the problem is that Marmoset isn't sync'ed to the same tangents as Max or Xnormal.
You will need to use hard edges/smoothing groups to get a decent bake. I would suggest simply assigning smoothing groups per uv island, which there is an easy script for in max with textools.
If you want properly displayed normals without hard edges, you need to use a baker+renderer that have synced tangents. Maya bakes + maya viewport display is synced, Max bakes + 3point shader with quality normals is synced.
if you've got all those maps finished and waiting, you could bake your detail map and blend it with the normals manually, surely? unless we're talking micro-pore-detail.
matt: sure does but if you want to present already existing assets in marmoset, you just have to expect to having to adapt a little here and there IMO. it reads and handles fairly large textures just fine here tho, so the baking-route might actually be viable for the time being.
and no, i wish - i'm in the middle of the move right now.
sorry for this late response, i have been moving around lately .
but to answer your question.
these are the settings i have always worked with, but no clue if these are the right ones XD
i work with maya.
and for your next question. i dont have crazybump
Those settings are fine
I like to check the normal maps using the "Incident Diffuse Light", which is under Rander> View >Incident Diffuse Light. Does the normal look ok there?
It would probably be a good idea to add something like a CB pass (or the xNormal/Nvidia filter) so that the detail matches your texture. The detail could be getting lost in the diffuse texture.
"I like to check the normal maps using the "Incident Diffuse Light", which is under Rander> View >Incident Diffuse Light. Does the normal look ok there? "
ok wich program are we talking about, maya, xnormals, toolbag?.
i will check it when i arrive home.
its very anoying to not have internet at home,
and not beeing able to ask questions .
Hey guys, so I just got my license today after being lazy for far too long, but I'm confused about installing the 1.04 update, I've downloaded it a couple times now and each time it shows up in windows as a "file" instead of an exe, am I supposed to overwrite another file somewhere or what?
also just as an aside, I love that I can F12 a screenshot at different sizes and whatnot, but is there a reason why the resulting image is differrent than if I just Printscreen it? if you see below, left is printscreen right is F12. Its not a huge difference but it is a noticable one that only gets worse if I increase the size.
if you see below, left is printscreen right is F12. Its not a huge difference but it is a noticable one that only gets worse if I increase the size.
It looks like sharpen is running away from you somehow. Try disabling that effect and see if the images match better?
The built in screenshot function does things to make your image nicer - mainly upping the resolution and adding some supersampling. As a side effect there will be less mip-mapping going on with your textures and so things may seem sharper (this is generally a good thing).
I like to check the normal maps using the "Incident Diffuse Light", which is under Rander> View >Incident Diffuse Light. Does the normal look ok there?
It would probably be a good idea to add something like a CB pass (or the xNormal/Nvidia filter) so that the detail matches your texture. The detail could be getting lost in the diffuse texture.
went into toolbag, and chose "Incident Diffuse Light"
the result looks like this.
since i have no internet at home , and here at school there are some restrictions , so i dont know so much about , and how too find it .:P
"It would probably be a good idea to add something like a CB pass (or the xNormal/Nvidia filter) so that the detail matches your texture. The detail could be getting lost in the diffuse texture."
went into toolbag, and chose "Incident Diffuse Light"
the result looks like this.
since i have no internet at home , and here at school there are some restrictions , so i dont know so much about , and how too find it .:P
"It would probably be a good idea to add something like a CB pass (or the xNormal/Nvidia filter) so that the detail matches your texture. The detail could be getting lost in the diffuse texture."
Your normal map looks like it is displaying perfectly and exactly how I would expect.
The "problem" here is more of an art content problem. The texture shot you showed, your diffuse didn't seem to really line up with the detail on the rock, it looked more like a random rock texture just thrown on there. For the normal map itself, the majority of the detail that you have is high-frequency noise type detail, without much mid-low frequency detail, its easy for this sort of detail to simply get lost, especially when you have a noisy texture thats running counter to the normal map itself.
I would suggest:
A. sculpting some rocks with a bit more interesting shapes, larger shapes etc
B. Adding an AO(or increasing the ao) to your diffuse to pull out some of these details more
C. Adding a crazybump/xnormal "detail" pass. http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=52183
The fact that the lighting looks good, there are no seams, smoothing errors or other artifacts/technical errors, you can pretty much nail it down to just an art content issue.
Hello.
I just bought marmoset and i'm trying to get it to work. I thought id try one of my ol heads, 6 k mesh from maya, .obj. Just one uvset. 2X2k textures, df and nm. But this is the result i got. Any idea what im doing wrong?
belltann: in the Marmoset window just above the Blend settings is a pic of your texture and it doesn't look like it's using the head texture that you've got on the right of the sceengrab. I'd try reloading the texture again but as a tga instead of a psd, I've had weird display problems in the past with psd (random and not always reproduceble) so it could be that.
@ScudzAlmighty & @TJS93 - If your download completed without a proper file extension, just edit the filename adding a .exe to the end, then double-click to run.
There was a bug with our download service that was just resolved today that was causing some file extension issues, primarily with IE.
I think it comes from compatibility problems with newer types of PSD (try to save the psd in an older version of photoshop, I think that's where the problem comes from)
Took some time out from modelling and to get me back into things I decided to go back to basics and model some simple assets. I would love some feedback on this. It needs a gloss map yet. ATM its diffuse/normal/spec.
I'm getting some rather perculiar banding, like cel-shading, using the SkinEnvironment and Sunlight settings. This disappears when using say, the Bluesky lighting.
The problem is made worse when point lights are added and gives an almost reflective surface. Is this a bug in the diffuse alpha being used as the reflection mask previously mentioned?
This is on Toolbag 1.04.
On a side note, the Sunlight seems overly bright and whites tend to ping out, even with specular and bloom turned off. Anyone else noticed that?
I did some more digging and it seems my gloss map stored in my specular's alpha channel is at fault.
At work we have the gloss controlling tightness and broadness only and didin't realise Toolbag has an additional control called specular sharpness to controlt he intensity of the gloss. From personal preference, I'd rather the control was in just the map rather than split between the gloss map and the slider.
If this question has already been ask then my bad but...is there a way to NOT take Marmosets background with you in your screencapture.It would make editing the background wayyy easier then trying to magic wand the shit away afterwards in Photoshop.
@whw - for clarification, your gloss map in Toolbag is controlling the "tightness and broadness" of your specular reflections. The specular sharpness slider is setting the maximum sharpness limit for your material. i.e. all white pixels in your Gloss Map (alpha of your Specular Map) will be whatever sharpness is set on the slider, with lower values in your gloss map providing "duller" areas of specular sharpness.
@EiGHT - If you're using Toolbag's screenshot feature, your background will always be located in the alpha channel of the .tga for easy compositing later.
hello! im pretty new at using marmoset and im simply trying to take nice pictures of my 2 of my 3D models. But i am having the most difficult time with the spec, it looks ridiculous and im trying every thing that come to my mind and i cant seem to find the answer... its probably easy so im hoping you guys can help...
every time i put a spec on it dos this, but then, if i turn my character, it looks like this... its like the program things my character is flat or something!!
thank you so much for you help, right now i feel like im on the verge of a mental break down!
every time i put a spec on it dos this, but then, if i turn my character, it looks like this... its like the program things my character is flat or something!!
It appears the trouble may lie with incorrect vertex normals on your model. Under the 'View' tab in Toolbag, toggle on 'Tangent Basis'. Are all blue vectors pointing out/away from the surface of your model?
You may need to go back into Maya and reset/normalize your vertex normals, then reexport (be sure to leave 'Write Tangents/Bitangents' option checked on the stooge export window.)
Try out exporting as an obj and fbx as well and see if you see any different results.
Hey, I've been wrestling with this issue all day. Im not entirely sure its related to marmoset, more my export from max, but I though you guys would be able to point me in the right direction.
What I've tried:
-exporting as .FBX (fixed the hair on one export but screwed up other parts)
-Reseting Normals/Xforms
-Unifying normals (dont even know what that means... )
again, im continuing to check all resources and this thread but I havent foud anything as of yet
Hey, I've been wrestling with this issue all day. Im not entirely sure its related to marmoset, more my export from max, but I though you guys would be able to point me in the right direction.
I'm guessing you're referring to the seams in the hair once you switch the material type to Anisotropic? I'm going to guess that it has to do with your UV layout. The Anisotropy shader will cause seams on a surface if all the polygons of that surface do not have contiguous texture coordinates.
For more info, checkout the Anisotropy PROTIPS on page 20 of the User Manual.
I'm guessing you're referring to the seams in the hair once you switch the material type to Anisotropic? I'm going to guess that it has to do with your UV layout. The Anisotropy shader will cause seams on a surface if all the polygons of that surface do not have contiguous texture coordinates.
For more info, checkout the Anisotropy PROTIPS on page 20 of the User Manual.
thanks, I've seen the protips, but this isn't about UV seams. I've checked to see if my island got unwelded, but all the hair planes are complete contiguous maps
I'm just trying out the trial version of marmoset and I have come across a problem that hopefully someone here will be able to help me fix.
I have a model and I want to create dirt marks on it. I thought the best way would be to have the dirt marks on seperate poly 'chunks' with a differnt material and texture and set it to use the multiply blending mode. This doesn't seem to work though. Infact, the multiply blending mode seems to do very little. I'm using a grayscale texture with the parts I want transparent set to white. My understanding is that the white areas ahould become transparent. this is not the case.
Can someone suggest a way of achieving dirt decals like this in the marmoset viewer? I tried the dithering alpha and that didn't really work as the effect wasn't noticeable enough and the alpha threshold didn't work as it just looked like a big black blob.
(I'm lead to believe that marmoset doesn't have full range alpha transparency)
any help greatly appreciated.
Ive run into a nice big fat problem:
Marmoset seems to crash about 50 seconds after I launch it, yep I timed it. I dont get an error message or anything it just closes itself with no warning of any kind. Oddly enough I was using it all last night an had zero problems.
The only thing that's changed between now and then was I believe my computer did an automatic update during the night. I know it's not a mesh or texture issue, it will crash just the same when it's sitting there not doing anything.
Ive reinstalled to no avail and rebooted as well. Im going to try uninstalling and then reinstalling from scratch next and if that fails a rollback to before the windows update.
Specs:
System- HP TouchSmart 2 (Tablet)
GPU- ATI Mobility Readon HD 5450
CPU- Intel i5 1.2Ghz
OS- Win7
RAM- 8GB
HD- 600 GB
Replies
I had the same issue with a mirrored model and it displayed fine in max and UDK.
I have a problem with both versions tho.. I can only use the Flat Render... the others don't work.. The mesh appears as a flat gray when i try.. I guess that's cause of my notebook. If anyone else had this problem and managed to fix it I would be really grateful for some pointers.
I'm a bit lost here. I did try to google as well but I can't find my answer :
Is there a way to mask (with a map, not per poly/material) a detail map ?
Thank you very much
If I use the Average normals option, it's almost perfect :
BUT in both cases when I display the normal map in the Marmoset Toolbag, I get horrible distorsions :
I tried everything, from exporting to OBJ, FBX, changing the normals export options, removing the smoothing groups, baked my normqls in Max, nothing worked... I'm about to go medieval on my keyboard !
You will need to use hard edges/smoothing groups to get a decent bake. I would suggest simply assigning smoothing groups per uv island, which there is an easy script for in max with textools.
If you want properly displayed normals without hard edges, you need to use a baker+renderer that have synced tangents. Maya bakes + maya viewport display is synced, Max bakes + 3point shader with quality normals is synced.
Thank you guys !
AFAIK, I dont think it's possible
I hope you're wrong nonetheless, and if you're not, let's hope it's in the pipes for an update...
if you've got all those maps finished and waiting, you could bake your detail map and blend it with the normals manually, surely? unless we're talking micro-pore-detail.
sorry for this late response, i have been moving around lately .
but to answer your question.
these are the settings i have always worked with, but no clue if these are the right ones XD
i work with maya.
and for your next question. i dont have crazybump
and no, i wish - i'm in the middle of the move right now.
Those settings are fine
I like to check the normal maps using the "Incident Diffuse Light", which is under Rander> View >Incident Diffuse Light. Does the normal look ok there?
It would probably be a good idea to add something like a CB pass (or the xNormal/Nvidia filter) so that the detail matches your texture. The detail could be getting lost in the diffuse texture.
ok wich program are we talking about, maya, xnormals, toolbag?.
i will check it when i arrive home.
its very anoying to not have internet at home,
and not beeing able to ask questions .
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12243880/WTF.png
things I have tried :
~ Inverted the green channel
~ tried both FBX And .OBJ
~ Painted out the red , yellow and very green parts of the bake
~ Cleaned the mesh within maya
~ it was triangulated before the import
This mesh has no over lapping UV's
If anyone can help that would be wonderful thanks!
also just as an aside, I love that I can F12 a screenshot at different sizes and whatnot, but is there a reason why the resulting image is differrent than if I just Printscreen it? if you see below, left is printscreen right is F12. Its not a huge difference but it is a noticable one that only gets worse if I increase the size.
It looks like sharpen is running away from you somehow. Try disabling that effect and see if the images match better?
The built in screenshot function does things to make your image nicer - mainly upping the resolution and adding some supersampling. As a side effect there will be less mip-mapping going on with your textures and so things may seem sharper (this is generally a good thing).
went into toolbag, and chose "Incident Diffuse Light"
the result looks like this.
since i have no internet at home , and here at school there are some restrictions , so i dont know so much about , and how too find it .:P
"It would probably be a good idea to add something like a CB pass (or the xNormal/Nvidia filter) so that the detail matches your texture. The detail could be getting lost in the diffuse texture."
Your normal map looks like it is displaying perfectly and exactly how I would expect.
The "problem" here is more of an art content problem. The texture shot you showed, your diffuse didn't seem to really line up with the detail on the rock, it looked more like a random rock texture just thrown on there. For the normal map itself, the majority of the detail that you have is high-frequency noise type detail, without much mid-low frequency detail, its easy for this sort of detail to simply get lost, especially when you have a noisy texture thats running counter to the normal map itself.
I would suggest:
A. sculpting some rocks with a bit more interesting shapes, larger shapes etc
B. Adding an AO(or increasing the ao) to your diffuse to pull out some of these details more
C. Adding a crazybump/xnormal "detail" pass. http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=52183
The fact that the lighting looks good, there are no seams, smoothing errors or other artifacts/technical errors, you can pretty much nail it down to just an art content issue.
I just bought marmoset and i'm trying to get it to work. I thought id try one of my ol heads, 6 k mesh from maya, .obj. Just one uvset. 2X2k textures, df and nm. But this is the result i got. Any idea what im doing wrong?
Down right, maya screengrab.
cheers!
There was a bug with our download service that was just resolved today that was causing some file extension issues, primarily with IE.
If you have a spec and a gloss map where do you place them in marmoset?
There is only one input for spec & gloss.
Bit of a beginner with all these maps so just wondering on where to put them both.
Im also having trouble getting the spec to pop.
Any tips you guys can give me would be much appreciated!
Thanks!
Took some time out from modelling and to get me back into things I decided to go back to basics and model some simple assets. I would love some feedback on this. It needs a gloss map yet. ATM its diffuse/normal/spec.
Thanks again!
I'm getting some rather perculiar banding, like cel-shading, using the SkinEnvironment and Sunlight settings. This disappears when using say, the Bluesky lighting.
The problem is made worse when point lights are added and gives an almost reflective surface. Is this a bug in the diffuse alpha being used as the reflection mask previously mentioned?
This is on Toolbag 1.04.
On a side note, the Sunlight seems overly bright and whites tend to ping out, even with specular and bloom turned off. Anyone else noticed that?
At work we have the gloss controlling tightness and broadness only and didin't realise Toolbag has an additional control called specular sharpness to controlt he intensity of the gloss. From personal preference, I'd rather the control was in just the map rather than split between the gloss map and the slider.
Anyway, great work on the tools guys.
Just sayin'.
@EiGHT - If you're using Toolbag's screenshot feature, your background will always be located in the alpha channel of the .tga for easy compositing later.
every time i put a spec on it dos this, but then, if i turn my character, it looks like this... its like the program things my character is flat or something!!
thank you so much for you help, right now i feel like im on the verge of a mental break down!
It appears the trouble may lie with incorrect vertex normals on your model. Under the 'View' tab in Toolbag, toggle on 'Tangent Basis'. Are all blue vectors pointing out/away from the surface of your model?
You may need to go back into Maya and reset/normalize your vertex normals, then reexport (be sure to leave 'Write Tangents/Bitangents' option checked on the stooge export window.)
Try out exporting as an obj and fbx as well and see if you see any different results.
i was on the verge of abandoning Marmoset for ever! but now everything looks so nice! i cant even believe it!
thanks again! you are the best!
heres what it looks like now!
What I've tried:
-exporting as .FBX (fixed the hair on one export but screwed up other parts)
-Reseting Normals/Xforms
-Unifying normals (dont even know what that means...
again, im continuing to check all resources and this thread but I havent foud anything as of yet
I'm guessing you're referring to the seams in the hair once you switch the material type to Anisotropic? I'm going to guess that it has to do with your UV layout. The Anisotropy shader will cause seams on a surface if all the polygons of that surface do not have contiguous texture coordinates.
For more info, checkout the Anisotropy PROTIPS on page 20 of the User Manual.
I'm just trying out the trial version of marmoset and I have come across a problem that hopefully someone here will be able to help me fix.
I have a model and I want to create dirt marks on it. I thought the best way would be to have the dirt marks on seperate poly 'chunks' with a differnt material and texture and set it to use the multiply blending mode. This doesn't seem to work though. Infact, the multiply blending mode seems to do very little. I'm using a grayscale texture with the parts I want transparent set to white. My understanding is that the white areas ahould become transparent. this is not the case.
Can someone suggest a way of achieving dirt decals like this in the marmoset viewer? I tried the dithering alpha and that didn't really work as the effect wasn't noticeable enough and the alpha threshold didn't work as it just looked like a big black blob.
(I'm lead to believe that marmoset doesn't have full range alpha transparency)
any help greatly appreciated.
cheers
Marmoset seems to crash about 50 seconds after I launch it, yep I timed it. I dont get an error message or anything it just closes itself with no warning of any kind. Oddly enough I was using it all last night an had zero problems.
The only thing that's changed between now and then was I believe my computer did an automatic update during the night. I know it's not a mesh or texture issue, it will crash just the same when it's sitting there not doing anything.
Ive reinstalled to no avail and rebooted as well. Im going to try uninstalling and then reinstalling from scratch next and if that fails a rollback to before the windows update.
Specs:
System- HP TouchSmart 2 (Tablet)
GPU- ATI Mobility Readon HD 5450
CPU- Intel i5 1.2Ghz
OS- Win7
RAM- 8GB
HD- 600 GB