Hey all, I'm having a problem where I'm trying to render an animation in marmoset.

The original mesh and animation were done in 3ds max. I exported the mesh and bones to Maya using FBX, and used the Stooge Export plugin as directed to get the 3 files (.mesh. .anim and .skel) that could be imported into Marmoset.

However, while I can import my mesh fine, importing the skeleton crashes Marmoset. I've tried looking around for anyone who has this issue, and the only result on Google I could find talked about making sure that the bones didn't have any funny characters in them. My naming convention is pretty standard (finger_mid_eff) is an example, so I doubt that's the issue here.

Would anyone be able to help assist with this issue?

Apologies if this question was asked earlier in the thread, but how do I keep the stooge exporter from messing with my normals during the export? I'm using Maya 2011, and I have all my hard/soft edges properly set, but when I export with stooge it seems to randomly harden certain edges. Thanks in advance!

- Jordan

Originally Posted by jordan.kocon

Apologies if this question was asked earlier in the thread, but how do I keep the stooge exporter from messing with my normals during the export? I'm using Maya 2011, and I have all my hard/soft edges properly set, but when I export with stooge it seems to randomly harden certain edges. Thanks in advance!

i've not used maya in a long time but couldn't you lock your normals in that package?

hey guys.. is there any way to have the automatically generated alpha channel in tga files include all chunks? for me, it seems to only mask the last chunk in the list.

the grey background is easy enough to select and delete in photoshop, but it might pose problems somewhere down the line.

also, please grant us users separate texture slots for gloss maps and alphas - my photoshop action editing skills have hit a brick wall trying to automatically copy my newly generated gloss maps into the specular map, and this severely limits marmosets usefulness as a quick preview tool, unfortunately..

(your workflows might be different, i save out various maps from a single psd file with qSave using actions)

@thomasp Locking the normals doesnt seem to help, the exporter still messes with them.

I was wondering if there was a quick way to select multiple "chunks" from the Chunks/Materials list at one time. It's a pain to have to go through object by object first selecting the chunk, then the material, then applying. It would be cool if I could shift+click within the list and also not have the material get deselected each time I apply it.

Two more small questions. First, I noticed that there are shaded lines where the edges of the geo meet up. This is especially prevalent when I spin the light source around the model. I was wondering if there was a way to get rid of this. Second, I get really bad texture popping where a texture from one object will pass to another object when I am rotating the camera around the model (almost looks like z-fighting). Is there a way to stop this? Sorry if these have been answered but I didn't see anything on this.

I have a question regarding exporting models from within modo to Marmoset.
I can't seem to get any mesh I export to work. My model always just displays in its netral stance. No matter if I export it as OBJ or FBX or whether it's posed or not. Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong?

Originally Posted by jordan.kocon

@thomasp Locking the normals doesnt seem to help, the exporter still messes with them.

dang, well in that case you could export via FBX or even OBJ and if things still fail, as a last resort consider smoothing the normals and breaking up the mesh wherever you want a hard crease.

i found (when exporting from max) that triangulating the whole mesh and using FBX with some option to keep any edited normals (not at the relevant machine right now, sorry) worked every time whereas exporting as quads or using a different file format often introducted errors.

biggest gripe with marmoset here is the lack of an merge/remove mesh chunk option. re-exporting/re-importing the entire scene for every single little vertex change - really?

Hello,

Iam currently having problem with my alpha planes. This seems to me like its the Alpha Sorting Issue. However It displays fine inside Marmoset viewport with Alpha to Coverage turned on but Doesnt work when i take a screenshot ( Render )

Here are few images to explain further





t would be great if anyone could help. Thank you

Girish

Hi!

This might be late and maybe somebody's come up with the same answer but anyways...

On page 11 of this thread there are talks about how to generate a anisotropic direction map and I found a way.

First off, I've created some hair with the hair&fur plugin from 3dsmax. I set the renderer to VRAY and set the hairs to render as "geometry" instead of "buffer".

Here's the trick, you have to animate the "Cut length" in the "general parameters" of the hair&fur modifier so the hair grows over time. Once you've done that, you go in "render element" and add "VrayVelocity".


Basically, the anisotropic direction map has the green and red channel just like a velocity map. Since you're growing the hair, the velocity map created will end up being EXACTLY the aniso. direction map you need.

The only thing left is flipping the green channel and voilà. Here's an early test. I need to redo the hair patches and tweak the hair&fur but I think I'm on the right track!

*edit: forgot to say that this was done in UDK.

This is a wonderful tool.

Currently i just wanted to ask is there way in marmoset toolbag to import more than one Uv channel.I am making this asset and it's diffuse and spec use one Uv channel and Normal Map uses another UV channel.So please can anyone tell me how i can go about fixing this issue?

In UDK, if i exported my mesh in FBX format from Maya and imported there.Everything just worked fine but here i can't seem to figure out.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Once again this is a great tool for presenting assets.I have used UDK earlier but it's way too cubersome and doesn't give awesome results.

^ i don't think there is, and the last update is quite a while ago ;/

Hey. I am using marmoset and it is very useful tool. But here I will list some bugs or limitations I have encountered so far:

1. I have 10 materials and each of them has 4k normal,spec,diffuse. When I add 11th material the app start lagging so much that I cant even use it.

2. High supersapmpling make highlights less powerful.

Originally Posted by ahtiandr

Hey. I am using marmoset and it is very useful tool. But here I will list some bugs or limitations I have encountered so far:

1. I have 10 materials and each of them has 4k normal,spec,diffuse. When I add 11th material the app start lagging so much that I cant even use it.

Have you ever got this to work?

This would use massive amount of memory and its likely that you are running out of VRAM.
AFAIK, Marmoset doesn't compress textures and from what I can tell doing my own tests, it uses around 85mb per 4k texture.
This means you are using 255mb per material and 11 materials, which comes to 2805mb, plus rendering overheads such as lighting a geometry etc.

I'm surprised that you can use 10 without lag ;)

oh I see now. Well I have 8gb of ram but I know that toolbag is 32 bit so probably it can use only 2k of my ram. Is it correct? Also my video card has 3gb of memory.

Oh and just remembered. When I render out a turntable with 24fps it gives me 24.39 fps and when I use this rendered video in AE to combine with my other videos in my showreel, I get some poppings . Looks like there are some problems with frame rate but I set my comp to 24fps in AE.

PS. I am using this laptop:
http://www.asus.com/Notebooks/Gaming_Powerhouse/G74SX/

It's the GPU's RAM that you need to be looking at, rather than your system RAM.

With 11 materials coming in at 2805mb plus a around 170mb or so for rendering overheads, you are prob. very close to maxing out your GPU's memory (2975mb), which explains why you are getting lag.

For the popping issue, you might want to try using the 360 shot feature which take a series of images as the turntable rotates, rather than rendering out video in realtime which can be extremely intensive. You can then place the images together in the correct order and render out a movie in AE or Premiere etc.

ok, I have tried to render images and I still have a bit of popping but it looks like it is due to a big amount of materials I have in my scene. There is no poppings when I render mesh with one material

Yea, that sounds about right. You are hitting the limits of you GPU, so you will prob need to condense some textures in your scene.

What is the scene exactly? Do you really need 11x4k texture sets? It really seems quite excessive for anything I can think of. You could probably use 2k for everything and it would look fine

Well I am doing just a character for my showreel but I like how you can change the settings of the materials in marmoset. Especially ability to change specular colour on the fly. I know it can be done in ps but it was just faster to do in marmoset and experiment with different highlight colours. So I was creating new material for each piece of my character. Not necessary though. I started to combine them now and There will be two mats in the end. I just didnt think about the hardware limitations =)

I'm using the DX11 Tessellation for the first time, it works fine.
I got only one problem : when I load a displacement map for my tessellation all my dynamic spot-light instantaneously stop working.
The different sky setup works fine, but if I add one light or more they doesn't work.

It's normal ?

Figured out why the z-fighting was occurring, was a scale issue. Turns out that my settings in max output my models the size of small apartment buildings, but once scaled down to the human ref things are peachy.

One other question. I've found that creating lights in my scene results in gigantic gizmos for the lights. So large that I really can't effectively position them around my character. Any ideas how I can solve this? Thanks.

Originally Posted by ahtiandr

Well I am doing just a character for my showreel but I like how you can change the settings of the materials in marmoset. Especially ability to change specular colour on the fly. I know it can be done in ps but it was just faster to do in marmoset and experiment with different highlight colours. So I was creating new material for each piece of my character. Not necessary though. I started to combine them now and There will be two mats in the end. I just didnt think about the hardware limitations =)

where exactly are those 11 materials with 4k textures? how close do you want to go that you?

Originally Posted by Neox

where exactly are those 11 materials with 4k textures? how close do you want to go that you?

Well at the start I was creating each material for each part. Belt, Pants, Shirt, Tunic, Hands, Head...

It was easier for me to tweak each part individually but now I started to combine them and there are about 5 materials atm and there will be only two in the end. I know it is not good practice to do so but it was just how I did it and I will not do it in the same way next time=)

Btw, I have some fresnel reflections on the skin so Probably I will have to end up with three materials. One for one uv set another one is for another uv set and also the third one for the skin since it is the only part which has fresnel effect.

I was wondering if the "Use Alpha to Coverage" screenshot issue has been resolved as of 1.05. I am running this version and it's still happening for me when I try to screenshot stuff.

Also, I was wondering, is there a way to up the sample quality of shadow casting per material or even globally? When I check cast shadows on for a material the shadows it casts on neighboring objects are super pixelated (think the back of a character wearing a high cut tank top). The only way I can get this to not happen is to turn off shadow casting which is a poor solution for me.