As soon as I create point/spot lights, faces behind her bandana and her eyelids show up.
Looks like you're getting z-fighting on the dynamic light pass. This happens sometimes :-/ Making your mesh smaller or larger can sometimes help, or adjusting geometry that lies very close to co-planar.
Great tool 8M guys, a definite future purchase, however on a current project I am getting these artifacts that re-exporting, resetting and rebaking, do not seem to fix. Any ideas to the cause or solution? The model and normals were created in Max and the obj exporter was used.
@RPTGB - A few things might be causing that. First, make sure your normals on your mesh are set to only 1 smoothing group in Max and re-export. If that is not the case, you can also try inverting the green channel of the normal map using the swizzle settings under the 'View' tab of Toolbag.
@Womball - Toolbag does have an Anisotropy shader: AnisotropicEnvironment from the Material->Channel Model list. The only thing is anisotropy requires a direction map and they are not the easiest textures to come by. Turns out aniso documentation is all but absent in our manual so here's the skinny on direction maps:
The direction map (a.k.a. tangent map) determines which way the anisotropy fibers (hair strands, record grooves, etc) flow along the model surface. Just like normal maps contain a little scaled/biased vector at every pixel pointing out from the surface, a Direction map contains tangent vectors that flow along the surface at every point.
Coming up with a proper direction map by hand is about as difficult as painting a normal map by hand: impractical without proper tools. Worse, I'm not sure such tools even exist . We had something ghetto in Toolbag during DoD development but it needs a rewrite before public release.
For now, you could pick a single surface-direction all the fibers go in, and make a solid-color direction map. As normal map vectors point out in the Z direction, direction map vectors are limited to the XY plane. Put any color [0,255] in the R and G components of your texture and leave B as 127 (0 when unscaled/unbiased). A good example is RGB:255,127,127 for fibers that run in the X direction, 127,255,127 for Y, etc.
There is also a debug rendering mode for displaying the general direction anisotropy fibers are taking. Its a sort of black-and-white fur shader that gives some indication of direction vector flow.
This looks like a decent starting texture for hair direction. Getting into curls and frizzy hair is entirely different story.
direction map are in xnormal. I have no idea how to set it up yet though. It also can use tangent space. in the options and has swizzle xyz cordinates whatever that means. I also have never seen someone use it in a realtime shader, which is odd since it looks like it would take flat looking hair strips and make it look incredible.
I've been told "direction map" in xnormal means something else. Aniso direction maps need some kind of human input because xnormal cannot figure out which way hair strands should flow based on geometry alone. What you're looking for is something like the image below: an aniso direction map for a horse in darkest of days.
I have run into another problem with the alpha masked hair. Whether or not Alpha-to-coverage is on, I get white "outlines" of the hair polys. It seems it only goes away when I significantly increase the alpha threshold, which sacrifices hair quality.
Does anyone know if the command to change the resolution of the shadows has changed in the new version? Whenever I type "set render.shadows.res 2048" it tells me it's an invalid variable and if I type "Set render.shadows.res 2048" then it tells me it's an invalid command. What am I doing wrong? Is there a list of commands anywhere on the net? I'm also having a problem with the mipmapping of the textures in toolbag. I get seams whenever I back the camera out but not when I'm up close. (my textures have a rather large seam overpaint too!)
I tested the Z-fighting issue on another computer with a different graphics card and did not have that problem. Also, scaling the mesh didn't seem to fix the problem, whether I did it in Maya or in Marmoset. Any ideas?
Coming up with a proper direction map by hand is about as difficult as painting a normal map by hand: impractical without proper tools. Worse, I'm not sure such tools even exist . We had something ghetto in Toolbag during DoD development but it needs a rewrite before public release.
It would be wonderful if the next release of Toolbag had some way to help generate direction maps! At work, one of our programmers wrote something where you can draw lines in the direction the hair is flowing and it would somehow take the normal map and create a map for anisotropic highlights, but there were some severe limitations to it and required hair to be built and unwrapped in very specific ways.
This isn't a real-time solution, but in Maya you can rotate the angle of the highlight on an anisotropic shader. It's pretty primitive by default, but even limited control like that might be good enough for some purposes?
Does anyone know if the command to change the resolution of the shadows has changed in the new version?
Shadow resolution is no longer user configurable in toolbag. We're using a new shadow algorithm and the new system doesn't really allow for changing this value at run time. Besides, it's about as high as most video hardware can go right now. That seam you're seeing is probably a result of a different artifact that doesn't have anything to do with shadow resolution.
Caveman: my first thought is make sure your hair texture doesn't have any white around the edges. If it does, mip-mapping can cause it to bleed through, which looks like what you're seeing there.
Shadow resolution is no longer user configurable in toolbag. We're using a new shadow algorithm and the new system doesn't really allow for changing this value at run time. Besides, it's about as high as most video hardware can go right now. That seam you're seeing is probably a result of a different artifact that doesn't have anything to do with shadow resolution.
Caveman: my first thought is make sure your hair texture doesn't have any white around the edges. If it does, mip-mapping can cause it to bleed through, which looks like what you're seeing there.
Sorry, I should have clarified. Yes they are indeed two separate problems. So it seems that the shadows being a bit grainy is just due to my gfx card(it's on the older side)
The seams are just a mipmapping thing like you said, but I was wondering how to get rid of them, I forced AA to x16 on my nvidia control panel and still had them, although they were indeed less visible. I have a good size overpaint on my textures too.
I also found a major bug, every time I pushed the fresnel slider to any value above 0 with a dynamic light in my scene the shader will break, but only at certain camera views(particularly if the camera was above the object with the shader applied.) I was able to recreate this bug in multiple scenes starting over from scratch. Has anyone else had this issue?
I have a question about animations in the marmoset toolbag.
I see that there is a plug in for maya to export skeleton, rig and animations, but I only have 3ds max here and i can't see any plug ins for max ...
Is there a way of doing /exporting animations from 3ds max and load them into marmoset or not ?
Option A) All textures do not display and I'm left with a white surface.
Option Shadows only load across half or a quarter of the model leaving a harsh vertical or horizontal line where they abruptly stop.
Option C) specular highlights blow out.
@RPTGB - A few things might be causing that. First, make sure your normals on your mesh are set to only 1 smoothing group in Max and re-export. If that is not the case, you can also try inverting the green channel of the normal map using the swizzle settings under the 'View' tab of Toolbag.
Cheers for that, I've checked and double checked all that though with no success. If I used object space normal maps the errors dont appear but the whole model doesn't look right then. Its only those tris that I have highlighted that seem to be affected too. V.strange.
@GoSsS - Your best bet right now of getting Max animation/rigging data into Toolbag would be to export from Max as FBX, import FBX into Maya, then proceed with the StoogeExport process. While that process has worked before, it is fairly untested. Let us know what kind of results you get.
@artquest - We've tried our darnedest to break anything using the combination of fresnel settings & dynamic lighting with no success. We would recommend updating your graphics drivers, and if that doesn't work, email us your system specs. Thanks!
I had that same problem when I exported an OBJ from Maya. I exported using FBX format, with the smoothing groups active. I'm sure there is a Max equiv.
Alright i hope im not reposting someone else's problem already, but here is mine.
Whenever i load in an obj. instead of the standard white-ish mesh that imports (at least thats what the originial toolbag did) i get a flash of an outline of my model, then it disappears. No mesh. However when i turn on the skybox, i get a grey version of the model. (the same color as the background color) I have plugged in my diffuse, normal, and spec and nothing happens. just Grey. I have found out that if i change my background color it will change the color of the model to the same, but still not show my maps.
Is there something i am not doing correctly. I load up the engine. Open Mesh. Add maps to the diffuse, normal, and spec slots. and....nothing.
Whenever i load in an obj. instead of the standard white-ish mesh that imports (at least thats what the originial toolbag did) i get a flash of an outline of my model, then it disappears. No mesh. However when i turn on the skybox, i get a grey version of the model. (the same color as the background color) I have plugged in my diffuse, normal, and spec and nothing happens. just Grey. I have found out that if i change my background color it will change the color of the model to the same, but still not show my maps.
Is there something i am not doing correctly. I load up the engine. Open Mesh. Add maps to the diffuse, normal, and spec slots. and....nothing.
Any ideas?
A few things have been known to cause this, but I'm going to wager a guess that your mesh has no vertex skinning data with it, but you have enabled the "vertex skinning" tickbox on it's materials. Lemme know if unchecking that tickbox fixes your problem.
A few things have been known to cause this, but I'm going to wager a guess that your mesh has no vertex skinning data with it, but you have enabled the "vertex skinning" tickbox on it's materials. Lemme know if unchecking that tickbox fixes your problem.
Sadly no. Another interesting issue i have encountered though is that when i have a spec map plugged in, and i turn on the use spec tickbox, my mesh goes completely black. THEN if i turn on vertex skinning it goes back to my background color.
@ Geri0n - Try updating your graphics drivers. If that does not help, email us your hardware specs and be sure to attach any Toolbag .log files found in your Toolbag program directory.
email address is: toolbag [at] 8monkeylabs [dot] com
Hello, thanks for a great tool. I tried exporting an animation using the stooge plugin using Maya 2008. But when I load the animation and skeleton in Marmoset, the skeleton animates but the mesh remains stationary. I think the skinning's not been imported, any idea why this'd happen? Thank you.
@Joe - Make sure you've enabled 'Vertex Skinning' on each of your materials in Toolbag. If that is already done but you're still having trouble, check your Toolbag .log files (found in your Toolbag directory and open-able in any text editor) for any errors reported. If there are errors, please email us with those.
hi, i am haveing trouble with the aphlas. it displays fine but when i hit F12 and render it, it dose not render with the alpha. any idea what i am doing wrong?
Hi everybody , i downloaded the last marmoset demo , and i get an error when i launch it . an access violation error and the program shut down .
I installed latest drivers , physX , OpenAL , but nothing changed .
did anyone encountered the same problem ?
Yeah mine does not start either.
I skipped through the pages but did not find a solution.
I do not even see what error I get.
Installed physx and openal too.
ATI radeon hd 5700
i7 4x2,8ghz and 4x virtual
win7 32bit
have to look up the rest if it is of importance
If you've got an ATI card and it doesn't boot, it's probably the driver bug many of our users have been experiencing. Video driver updates have helped most folks, so I'd give that a shot.
Dam dam dam, looking back at it, it was just that simple..
Thanks for the help, I got it working and i'm a happy man.
Will sure put some money on this and use it for my upcoming portfolio.
I would love to get some input on my question since i would like to solve it before my trial ends:(
Still a great program though!
Here's something i'm working on:
Does anyone know how to get mirror like reflections in Toolbag? The best I've been able to do is glossy specular highlights from environment lighting. I'm more interested in creating things like chrome and reflective water surfaces.
The environment is lightly reflected in the material with white specular but anyway you probably are asking about sphere ambient. I hope in a future you can choose different sphere ambient texture for your materials to have more specific kind of materials, ex, chrome, metal, with cheap resources.
Ok im new to marmoset and im new to presenting work nicely, i need some tuts on how to use marmoset, can you import multiple meshes with multiple textures? if so hooooow. does anyone have a link to someone showing how they set up there scene in mamorset? does anyone also have any tuts on good presentation for a games character? thanks alot
Sure, you can import a single file that is made up of multiple meshes. You can then apply different materials to each mesh "chunk". The different chunks are found on the right side of the screen.
Hey guys just had a technical question, I'm having an issue with my toolbag. When I enable certain effects my entire screen greys out and and i see weird lines going through the model. I thought it might be trail version issue but that wouldn't make sense because I paid for a full version because it was so awesome. I now fear it may be my video card.
Here are my quick specs if it helps diagnose the problem
Mac Pro running Windows 7
video card ATI Radeon 2600
Hey guys just had a technical question, I'm having an issue with my toolbag. When I enable certain effects my entire screen greys out and and i see weird lines going through the model. I thought it might be trail version issue but that wouldn't make sense because I paid for a full version because it was so awesome. I now fear it may be my video card.
Here are my quick specs if it helps diagnose the problem
Mac Pro running Windows 7
video card ATI Radeon 2600
Thanks for the help guys
Have you updated your GPU drivers?
Thats the usual suspect it seems
Here some pics of the problems that i'm having with marmoset
1. Here is the Chromatic Aboration issue. (I also get this bug occasionally when I uncheck Post Process Effects)
2. When I use the depth of field there is NO gradual fade of the lens blur there is only blurred or not blurred. I'm sure there is supposed to be a gradual fade, I could be wrong though. (FYI I have the bokeh size turned way up just so you can see the problem in my screenshot.
3. When I enable the outline shader the entire mesh is outlined on all transparent or semitransparent BACK faces. (FYI I have tried it with Back Face Kulling ON and OFF with same results.)
4. I also get this awesomeness when I turn Ambient Occlusion OFF.
Thanks for your help Metalliandy, nice work on you site, I checked you stuff out.:thumbup:
Thats some real crazy stuff you have going on there
I think it has to be a card specific or driver issues really.
I have never seen anything like it in Marmoset
Hello there,
Always have been too intimidated to join this place (Always too afraid that my work is crap) but since I downloaded the Marmoset trial and I saw that this place seems to be great to get help and advice I was wondering if anyone could help me.
I have been playing around with the Phong Double Layer Environment setting, however no matter what I do I cant seem to get two textures to blend together, I assume that how the texture blends depends on the texture I load in the "layer" slot. But no matter what I do it either displays only one texture or it displays both textures blended equally regardless of what I load on the "layer" slot.
Anyone have any clues what I may be doing wrong or may be missing? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Also sorry if this has been answered before but I tried looking around and couldnt find anyone with a similar issue.
Anyways cheers for reading.
Here some pics of the problems that i'm having with marmoset
Wow, that's messed up. We have seen a few glitches similar to this on some newer ATI hardware & drivers here at work, and we're really not sure what is going on at this point. It is likely a driver issue of some sort. We will look into it for the next point release in case it's a bug in toolbag its self, but since most machines don't do it it's kind of doubtful that that's the cause.
I've been writing graphics code for years and the persistent trend has always been: ATI cards with visual glitches. Those of you considering buying new video hardware, take from that what you will.
I am having similar issues like onelunglewis. Turning on chromatic aberration gives me the same result. But depth of field workes fine, just that I get the same effect he gets when he turns off ao when I turn off depth of field.
Ao works fine for me and it didn't happen when turning off post prossesing.
My specs are Win7 x64 and Ati Mobility Radeon HD 3650.
just gave this a try after only having used the free marmoset toolbag from last year. some very cool improvements.
question: is there any way in marmoset to just update the mesh/chunks by importing a new OBJ/FBX into a scene? can I avoid having to re-apply the materials somehow?
@thomasp - The latest version does have auto-update on mesh files. Just make sure the "Auto-Reload" box next to the 'Open Mesh' button is checked. When you overwrite your mesh file with a new version, as long as the number of chunks or chunk names have not changed, your mesh in Toolbag will update for you and retain it's material assignments.
Replies
Looks like you're getting z-fighting on the dynamic light pass. This happens sometimes :-/ Making your mesh smaller or larger can sometimes help, or adjusting geometry that lies very close to co-planar.
The direction map (a.k.a. tangent map) determines which way the anisotropy fibers (hair strands, record grooves, etc) flow along the model surface. Just like normal maps contain a little scaled/biased vector at every pixel pointing out from the surface, a Direction map contains tangent vectors that flow along the surface at every point.
Coming up with a proper direction map by hand is about as difficult as painting a normal map by hand: impractical without proper tools. Worse, I'm not sure such tools even exist
For now, you could pick a single surface-direction all the fibers go in, and make a solid-color direction map. As normal map vectors point out in the Z direction, direction map vectors are limited to the XY plane. Put any color [0,255] in the R and G components of your texture and leave B as 127 (0 when unscaled/unbiased). A good example is RGB:255,127,127 for fibers that run in the X direction, 127,255,127 for Y, etc.
There is also a debug rendering mode for displaying the general direction anisotropy fibers are taking. Its a sort of black-and-white fur shader that gives some indication of direction vector flow.
This looks like a decent starting texture for hair direction. Getting into curls and frizzy hair is entirely different story.
direction map are in xnormal. I have no idea how to set it up yet though. It also can use tangent space. in the options and has swizzle xyz cordinates whatever that means. I also have never seen someone use it in a realtime shader, which is odd since it looks like it would take flat looking hair strips and make it look incredible.
I have run into another problem with the alpha masked hair. Whether or not Alpha-to-coverage is on, I get white "outlines" of the hair polys. It seems it only goes away when I significantly increase the alpha threshold, which sacrifices hair quality.
I tested the Z-fighting issue on another computer with a different graphics card and did not have that problem. Also, scaling the mesh didn't seem to fix the problem, whether I did it in Maya or in Marmoset. Any ideas?
It would be wonderful if the next release of Toolbag had some way to help generate direction maps! At work, one of our programmers wrote something where you can draw lines in the direction the hair is flowing and it would somehow take the normal map and create a map for anisotropic highlights, but there were some severe limitations to it and required hair to be built and unwrapped in very specific ways.
This isn't a real-time solution, but in Maya you can rotate the angle of the highlight on an anisotropic shader. It's pretty primitive by default, but even limited control like that might be good enough for some purposes?
Shadow resolution is no longer user configurable in toolbag. We're using a new shadow algorithm and the new system doesn't really allow for changing this value at run time. Besides, it's about as high as most video hardware can go right now. That seam you're seeing is probably a result of a different artifact that doesn't have anything to do with shadow resolution.
Caveman: my first thought is make sure your hair texture doesn't have any white around the edges. If it does, mip-mapping can cause it to bleed through, which looks like what you're seeing there.
Sorry, I should have clarified. Yes they are indeed two separate problems. So it seems that the shadows being a bit grainy is just due to my gfx card(it's on the older side)
The seams are just a mipmapping thing like you said, but I was wondering how to get rid of them, I forced AA to x16 on my nvidia control panel and still had them, although they were indeed less visible. I have a good size overpaint on my textures too.
I also found a major bug, every time I pushed the fresnel slider to any value above 0 with a dynamic light in my scene the shader will break, but only at certain camera views(particularly if the camera was above the object with the shader applied.) I was able to recreate this bug in multiple scenes starting over from scratch. Has anyone else had this issue?
Uhm, define break ...
I have a question about animations in the marmoset toolbag.
I see that there is a plug in for maya to export skeleton, rig and animations, but I only have 3ds max here and i can't see any plug ins for max ...
Is there a way of doing /exporting animations from 3ds max and load them into marmoset or not ?
Please tell me there is
Thanks in advance.
Option A) All textures do not display and I'm left with a white surface.
Option
Option C) specular highlights blow out.
Usually one of those 3 things happens.
Cheers for that, I've checked and double checked all that though with no success. If I used object space normal maps the errors dont appear but the whole model doesn't look right then. Its only those tris that I have highlighted that seem to be affected too. V.strange.
@artquest - We've tried our darnedest to break anything using the combination of fresnel settings & dynamic lighting with no success. We would recommend updating your graphics drivers, and if that doesn't work, email us your system specs. Thanks!
I had that same problem when I exported an OBJ from Maya. I exported using FBX format, with the smoothing groups active. I'm sure there is a Max equiv.
Whenever i load in an obj. instead of the standard white-ish mesh that imports (at least thats what the originial toolbag did) i get a flash of an outline of my model, then it disappears. No mesh. However when i turn on the skybox, i get a grey version of the model. (the same color as the background color) I have plugged in my diffuse, normal, and spec and nothing happens. just Grey. I have found out that if i change my background color it will change the color of the model to the same, but still not show my maps.
Is there something i am not doing correctly. I load up the engine. Open Mesh. Add maps to the diffuse, normal, and spec slots. and....nothing.
Any ideas?
A few things have been known to cause this, but I'm going to wager a guess that your mesh has no vertex skinning data with it, but you have enabled the "vertex skinning" tickbox on it's materials. Lemme know if unchecking that tickbox fixes your problem.
Sadly no. Another interesting issue i have encountered though is that when i have a spec map plugged in, and i turn on the use spec tickbox, my mesh goes completely black. THEN if i turn on vertex skinning it goes back to my background color.
email address is: toolbag [at] 8monkeylabs [dot] com
What card do you have?
This video of my latest work, hope you like it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfDmPAe33yg&fmt=22
...
I installed latest drivers , physX , OpenAL , but nothing changed .
did anyone encountered the same problem ?
(my config: core i7 920 , 6go DDR3 , gtx 260 , win 7 64 )
I skipped through the pages but did not find a solution.
I do not even see what error I get.
Installed physx and openal too.
ATI radeon hd 5700
i7 4x2,8ghz and 4x virtual
win7 32bit
have to look up the rest if it is of importance
Some help would be apreciated.
Thanks
If you've got an ATI card and it doesn't boot, it's probably the driver bug many of our users have been experiencing. Video driver updates have helped most folks, so I'd give that a shot.
Thanks for the help, I got it working and i'm a happy man.
Will sure put some money on this and use it for my upcoming portfolio.
Might be just me whoes missing something though since i can't get the Occlusion slot working.
I have 2 UV channels, one for random maps and one for AO
The map is generated in Xnormal.
Still a great program though!
Here's something i'm working on:
Multiple UVs need to be exported from maya(OBJ does not store mutliple UV channels) maybe this is your issue?
Thanks a thousand!
The environment is lightly reflected in the material with white specular but anyway you probably are asking about sphere ambient. I hope in a future you can choose different sphere ambient texture for your materials to have more specific kind of materials, ex, chrome, metal, with cheap resources.
Here are my quick specs if it helps diagnose the problem
Mac Pro running Windows 7
video card ATI Radeon 2600
Thanks for the help guys
Thats the usual suspect it seems
Ya that was the first thing I did.
Here some pics of the problems that i'm having with marmoset
1. Here is the Chromatic Aboration issue. (I also get this bug occasionally when I uncheck Post Process Effects)
2. When I use the depth of field there is NO gradual fade of the lens blur there is only blurred or not blurred. I'm sure there is supposed to be a gradual fade, I could be wrong though. (FYI I have the bokeh size turned way up just so you can see the problem in my screenshot.
3. When I enable the outline shader the entire mesh is outlined on all transparent or semitransparent BACK faces. (FYI I have tried it with Back Face Kulling ON and OFF with same results.)
4. I also get this awesomeness when I turn Ambient Occlusion OFF.
Thanks for your help Metalliandy, nice work on you site, I checked you stuff out.:thumbup:
Thats some real crazy stuff you have going on there
I think it has to be a card specific or driver issues really.
I have never seen anything like it in Marmoset
Always have been too intimidated to join this place (Always too afraid that my work is crap) but since I downloaded the Marmoset trial and I saw that this place seems to be great to get help and advice I was wondering if anyone could help me.
I have been playing around with the Phong Double Layer Environment setting, however no matter what I do I cant seem to get two textures to blend together, I assume that how the texture blends depends on the texture I load in the "layer" slot. But no matter what I do it either displays only one texture or it displays both textures blended equally regardless of what I load on the "layer" slot.
Anyone have any clues what I may be doing wrong or may be missing? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Also sorry if this has been answered before but I tried looking around and couldnt find anyone with a similar issue.
Anyways cheers for reading.
Wow, that's messed up. We have seen a few glitches similar to this on some newer ATI hardware & drivers here at work, and we're really not sure what is going on at this point. It is likely a driver issue of some sort. We will look into it for the next point release in case it's a bug in toolbag its self, but since most machines don't do it it's kind of doubtful that that's the cause.
I've been writing graphics code for years and the persistent trend has always been: ATI cards with visual glitches. Those of you considering buying new video hardware, take from that what you will.
Ao works fine for me and it didn't happen when turning off post prossesing.
My specs are Win7 x64 and Ati Mobility Radeon HD 3650.
Hope it will help you figure things out.
question: is there any way in marmoset to just update the mesh/chunks by importing a new OBJ/FBX into a scene? can I avoid having to re-apply the materials somehow?