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Marmoset Toolbag

Score10 out of 10

1 Reviews and Ratings

What is Marmoset Toolbag?

Marmoset Toolbag is a real-time rendering, texturing, and baking tool designed for professionals in the 3D visualization, game development, film production, and architectural industries. It caters to a wide range of companies and is utilized by professionals such as 3D artists, game developers, film and animation studios, architectural visualization studios, and product designers.

Key Features

Real-Time Ray Tracing: Marmoset Toolbag uses real-time ray tracing technology to deliver high-quality and realistic rendering results. It offers physically-accurate shading, global illumination, reflections, caustics, and more to enhance the visual quality of artwork.

Native Hardware Support for NVIDIA RTX Devices: Marmoset Toolbag provides native hardware support for NVIDIA RTX devices, enabling faster ray-traced results. The software is optimized to leverage the advanced capabilities of NVIDIA RTX GPUs.

Advanced Denoising: The AI denoising feature in Toolbag uses machine learning to retain detail and provide a smooth and realistic result. It reduces the number of ray casts required, resulting in faster render times and giving artists more creative freedom.

GPU Denoiser: Marmoset Toolbag includes a hardware-accelerated denoiser that is compatible with all NVIDIA GeForce cards (10 and newer). The GPU denoiser enhances the quality of rendered images in real-time.

High-Quality CPU Denoiser: Toolbag also offers a high-quality CPU denoiser that is compatible with any CPU and runs on both Mac and Windows systems. The CPU denoiser ensures excellent detail retention in rendered images.

Real-Time Raster Renderer: Marmoset Toolbag features an industry-standard, game-style raster renderer that provides complete creative control. It offers customizable ambient occlusion, local reflection, and diffuse light bounces, improved GGX and anisotropic shading, smoother anti-aliasing and transparency, and other advanced features.

Physically-Based Rendering and Material System: Toolbag's physically-based rendering and material system ensures natural and consistent results across various lighting and material styles. Artists can achieve accurate and realistic rendering of materials, including glass, liquids, gems, and surfaces with scattering properties.

Image-Based Lighting: Marmoset Toolbag allows users to recreate lighting from real-world locations using image-based lighting. Coupled with ray tracing, image-based lighting enables the generation of well-balanced lighting and dramatic shadows. The software provides access to a regularly updated library of hundreds of real-world skies.

Advanced Shading: Toolbag offers advanced shading options, including refraction, scattering, microfiber, and clearcoat shaders. Artists can create realistic glass, liquids, gems, and surfaces with refracted distortions, caustics, and adjustable refractive index controls. The scattering shader allows for the creation of natural-looking skin, wax, and leaves, while the microfiber shader provides realistic fabric rendering. The clearcoat shader adds a polished finish to materials such as car paint, carbon fiber, and lacquered wood.

Categories & Use Cases

A must for the video game industry workflows

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Marmoset Toolbag is mainly used as a baking program for HP(high poly) to LP (low poly) in game assets in our studio. The ease of achieving controlled and good bakes is a must for the game industry, something we could never find in any other programs. We also do lookdev and final polished renders very easily as well, which is a plus

Pros

  • Baking with custom cages
  • baking by separate meshes
  • controlled skewing and hand painted bake definitions
  • very optimized graphically speaking

Cons

  • probably when you have an already done baking setup and you change the mesh, the reload takes a lot of time.
  • sometimes its very difficult to find errors in the bake because the beauty render in Marmoset Toolbag hides it very well. In the viewer of our texturing program is very noticeable so I have to go back and forth between them to fix bake errors.
  • I guess the texturing deature of Marmoset Toolbag is not yet something that our studio is willing to jump over to, we have a lot of missing features from currently industry standard programs

Return on Investment

  • so the baking process from start to a good finish is about 90% more controlled than any other baking program out there
  • Achieving a good bake is much more easy for our artist meaning less time per asset correcting issues
  • its incredibly easy to learn, in a matter of hours an artist can be doing good work. so less training hours needed

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Adobe Substance 3D Collection and Blender

Other Software Used

Blender, Unreal Engine, ZBrush, Adobe Substance 3D Collection