Leica M3 for Marmoset Toolbag article
mod
Dear Humans,
I am very excited to be doing some work with the fellows at Marmoset (formerly 8monkey labs), makers of Marmoset Toolbag. The first thing we want to do is a tutorial covering material types within Toolbag, the various maps (Diffuse, Normal, Spec, Gloss) and how they all work together to create a dynamic material. This seems to be a frequent question, "How do I make X material in Toolbag?", so we figured it would be a good starting point. I'm working on an example asset that will show off a variety of material types (various metals, rubber, leather, varnished wood, etc.). The model(.mesh + .tgas) will be released with the tutorial so everyone can see it spinning around in full 3d glory.
So here it is, the Leica M3 w/ 50mm 1.2 Noctilux. Highpoly, rendered in Modo.
Low and bakes to follow.
We're planing on doing a variety of other tutorials to cover the more technical aspects of some of Marmoset Toolbag's features, and highlight some of the lesser known features as well. So stay tuned for more cool stuff.
I am very excited to be doing some work with the fellows at Marmoset (formerly 8monkey labs), makers of Marmoset Toolbag. The first thing we want to do is a tutorial covering material types within Toolbag, the various maps (Diffuse, Normal, Spec, Gloss) and how they all work together to create a dynamic material. This seems to be a frequent question, "How do I make X material in Toolbag?", so we figured it would be a good starting point. I'm working on an example asset that will show off a variety of material types (various metals, rubber, leather, varnished wood, etc.). The model(.mesh + .tgas) will be released with the tutorial so everyone can see it spinning around in full 3d glory.
So here it is, the Leica M3 w/ 50mm 1.2 Noctilux. Highpoly, rendered in Modo.
Low and bakes to follow.
We're planing on doing a variety of other tutorials to cover the more technical aspects of some of Marmoset Toolbag's features, and highlight some of the lesser known features as well. So stay tuned for more cool stuff.
Replies
Thanks Paul!
Yeah, I thought about doing the F/0.95, but that thing is so huge, it would dwarf the body.
aka this is sick
The tripod in general is a hodge-podge of various refs, but I see what you're saying and agree that bit is weak, its in your face a bit so I'll spruce it up before I get on to the low.
It's called a... tripod mount plate I guess. Interesting bit about this camera, the tripod mount is way off to the side, which looks a bit silly when mounted a tripod, so I did the little offset plate thing. Yeah, camera nerds, even worse than gun nerds!
Nice to see more camera nerds around here.
Some wires as well, there's a few sub-d tricks here, like floating in the viewfinder areas, then deleting the faces behind the floaters so I can cut an interior into the mesh, saves a lot of hassle doing it this way instead of merging those bits into the main mesh chunk.
Can't wait to see more.
Thanks!
Yeah, I tend to add bevels to pretty much everything, I think it improves readability and gives a nice little pop, but no in this case its not entirely realistic.
would it be ok to post the camera wires on my blog (gotwires.blogspot.com)?
thanks,
Sven
PS. I tried PM, but your inbox is full.
(This is awesome.)
On a serious note, how long did this take you (roughly)?
Its the neverending wireframe story! I wanted to give blorg another shot for his blog post, so, I'm not just randomly uploading new shots without doing any extra work if thats what it looks like lolol.
I'm doing this 2-3 hours a day between other commitments, so progress is slower than it otherwise would be. The high took about a week, so probably about two full work days for the actual modeling and then a little more for planing/reference gathering.
I'm on the low now but have some sort of cold/flu thing(seriously, who gets sick in the summer, wtf), but I want to get low/bakes done by the end of the week/weekend here.
This is... a side i've never seen of you mil xD
@EQ
Looks really nice man!, I have a camera like this at home
Thanks, yeah the front one is really easy to make, just make the basic shape, then select every other edge and scale it out from the center, and slice in the control loops to keep the shape. Same concept with the rear ring, just don't select all of the edges.
The middle ring is more complex, I used edge slide to slide the edges down to make the semi-circular cut-out shape, and then the same select every other edge + scale method to do the ridges.
Yeah if you've got a Leica M* I would love to get some real high res pics of the leather/rubber(leatherite?) grip pattern, preferable with very ambient lighting. Been hard to find anything all that high res, I've got a lot of old cameras here but no Leicas. =P
Doh.... Added a note to the first post that this is the high rendered in Modo, sorry if that wasn't evident. Though these Modo renders might make a good target for some features in the next version of toolbag....
I should be able to get a similar look on some of the materials, but not the self reflection/radiosity type look you get with an offline renderer.
Is 3600x2400 ok? I think that's the res. my camera has. Or bigger, one of the 2
Sorry man, it's a "Praktica Super TL-3" I do have the bag it comes in, I could make shots of it so you can model it with the Leica? They look of a similar size.
Cheers
Its cool, I've got a bunch of cameras and bags like that here I'm sure, I'll be done with the lowpoly modeling here soon so I don't plan on adding anything extra at this point, but thanks anyway!
I have Leica M2 that I can photograph for you. Need pics of anything else than the vulcanite/leatherite?
Can't wait to see more
Just a real quick overview of what I do after I complete the lowpoly modeling and UV work as far as material work is concerned.
1. Explode highpoly mesh
2. Assign basic materials to highpoly mesh. This part is major here. You can do use RGBCMYW as valid materials, or in other words:
RGB -1,0,0 - 0,1,0 - 0,0,1 - 1,1,0 - 0,1,1 - 1,0,1 - 1,1,1
I like to use the white material to mask sub-materials or additional misc. things that you would want to mask, if you're over 6 mats and still have a lot of little things to mask, put them all in one material, that way when you go to split it up, you only have to look in one spot for them.
You can stick to basic RGB as well but then you're only getting 3 masks, and you'll have to do a lot of hand editing after the fact if you've got more than 3 material types on your model, you can do arbitrary colors too but it is much harder to automate splitting the maps so I wouldn't recommend either. Per wrote a very nice Photoshop action for pulling apart the RGBCMYW masks, so you guys might have to beg him to release it. I'm pretty sure he is some sort of witch, as I have no idea how it actually works, and every time I try to think about it I get a headache.
3. Explode lowpoly mesh to match high
4. Bake your Normals, AO, and Color mask as you normally would.
Now you should have some awesomely horrendous nerf-looking thing like you see on the far right. Going through this process is super important, it will save an immense amount of time over manually selecting and masking your materials.
I'll condense this into the final tutorial, but figured some people may appreciate a little more explanation while I'm running through the process.
Lowpoly wires
This is baked in Maya, using a script (which I believe Mop wrote originally) to assign hard edges of the UV boarders(before baking of course). Then locking normals (normals->lock normals) and triangulating (Mesh -> Triangulate) as your mesh normals will change when you triangulate, and Marmoset will choose slightly different triangulation when you import a mesh with quads (causing X shaped smoothing errors). Simple OBJ export, this method is the most reliable I've found for getting good results into Marmoset, though FBX probably works fine too.
You can triangulate before baking too, but that can be a pain.
I think I've got something that works here now for the Vulcanite (Thanks, I forgot what it was actually called!). Anyway I think this works, I found a better ref that I was able to run through Crazybump.
I wouldn't mind extra references, and its always cool to see another Leica, but if its a bother for you don't worry about it. If you just want to post some photos of your sweet camera though, go right ahead.
The Vulcanite came out great. Never too much bother to try out some macro shots. Didn't have the best of lighting to work with but could put some refs up for you. PM me if something like Dropbox works for you.
and obviously the camera is looking perfect!
Awesome work, man. It's really cool to see your workflow on this.
It splits the colours in the texture and places each of them in their own layer, which is named after the colour within the layer, and then places them all in a group called RGBCMYW Masks.
It assumes that the colours used are in the correct order and that the background colour of the RGBCMYW base texture is black. As long as you use colours in the set order of Red, Green, Blue, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and White (i.e. RGB rather than GBR etc.), everything should process correctly and you will just need to delete the layers that have been created for which you do not have colours on the source image.
Currently the action has 2 versions which do slightly different things, depending on your needs:
RGBCMYW Splitter
- Splits the colours in the texture and places each of them in their own layer, which is named after the colour within the layer, and then places them all in a group called RGBCMYW Masks. Retains a copy of the source image which is located at the bottom of the layer stack.
RGBCMYW Splitter + Remove AA- Attempts to remove any cross contamination due to AA or due to colours mixing where bleed/edge padding is present. The actions then splits the colours in the texture and places each of them in their own layer, which is named after the colour within the layer, and then places them all in a group called RGBCMYW Masks. Retains a copy of the original and modified source image which are both located at the bottom of the layer stack.
You can grab the action HEREEnjoy!
Finished up the materials and now I'm working on the text for the tutorial. Hopefully we'll have something to show real soon!
Sexy work.