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Marmoset Toolbag 2 | Feedback & Suggestions

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  • almighty_gir
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    almighty_gir ngon master
    Cool, this is something i've been interested in adding personally but wasn't sure end users would like it :P

    I guess i'll add it to the request list!
  • Joost
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    Joost polycount sponsor
    Rule of thirds and golden ratio grid overlays would be great imo. Also an easy way to set the window size to the same ratio as your render output? I.e. for portrait renders.
  • radiancef0rge
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    radiancef0rge ngon master
    Joost wrote: »
    Rule of thirds and golden ratio grid overlays would be great imo.

    Rule of Thirds is easy.
    But how would would you want to non PHI based window sizes to look? IE, if you don't have a 1.6 ratio rectangle for a viewport would the overlay just stretch?
  • Joost
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    Joost polycount sponsor
    Rule of Thirds is easy.
    But how would would you want to non PHI based window sizes to look? IE, if you don't have a 1.6 ratio rectangle for a viewport would the overlay just stretch?

    Yeah I'm mainly after rule of thirds but if it's easy to implement then other overlays might be useful too. The phi grid could work like it does in photoshop where it just stretches?
  • radiancef0rge
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    radiancef0rge ngon master
    So I hacked in a rule of thirds overlay by overwriting the tonemapping function and using some random variable to modulate the thickness. Its mostly a proof of concept and totally unrelease-able as it is basically useless otherwise.

    https://vimeo.com/130167299
  • malcolm
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    malcolm polycount sponsor
    Those toolbars on the sides need to be detachable on a second monitor so we can actually see correct aspect ratio while working instead of doing that jarring squish each time you make it full screen. The rule of thirds is a really neat idea though.
  • Farfarer
    I thought I had asked this here before, but can't find my post (might've been on twitter)...

    But any word on 16bit TIF & PNG support?
  • almighty_gir
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    almighty_gir ngon master
    16 bit tif should work fine in the current (2.07) release, if you're having problems please let us know!

    16 bit png is currently unsupported.
  • Farfarer
    Yeah, 16bit TIF is playing up for me in 2.07.

    Example image attached, this is a plain white texture saved from Photoshop using LZW compression (although I tried all the compression methods and they all do the same thing).

    Here's the two files here if you want to test them locally;
    http://www.farfarer.com/temp/16bitTIF.zip
  • almighty_gir
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    almighty_gir ngon master
    Cheers James,

    We'll look into this.
  • EarthQuake
    Thanks for the test content. This is a known issue, we've got it logged in our system. Our new loader that does support 16/32 bit tiffs, does not support texture compression, so it reverts to the old loader when files have compression enabled. You can fix the issue for now by disabling compression on your tiff.
  • Farfarer
    Ah, right. Cheers Joe :)

    Seems like using 16bit TIF stops it from allowing sRGB sampling of textures, too.

    Enabling the option for the slot does nothing and when you hit OK and then go back to look at the option, it remains unticked.
  • EarthQuake
    Yeah we've got that one logged here as well, we may look into cleaning that up for the next update. Thanks!
  • fearian
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    fearian greentooth
    Quick post from work - I keep marmoset up while I texture, have you thought about including an 'always on top' option?


    PS. Also would like an option to turn off automatically expanding groups when I select an object. 80% of the time I don't need it.
  • fearian
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    fearian greentooth
    Joost wrote: »
    Yeah I'm mainly after rule of thirds but if it's easy to implement then other overlays might be useful too. The phi grid could work like it does in photoshop where it just stretches?

    I use this tool fairly often! It's very neat: http://www.brianapps.net/sizer/
  • Thousand
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    Thousand polycounter lvl 9
    Hi EQ,

    Marmoset Viewer is a blast! Very cool way to present models! This was the next logical step for your amazing tool!

    One thing that I have already requested several times would be to allow substances to map all of the Marmoset inputs.
    IMO the easiest way would be to name the substance outputs accordingly to the Marmoset inputs (i.e. fuzz).
    Everybody, who is working with substances a little bit longer will not only use the basic outputs (Base Color, Normal, Roughness, Metallicity, Opacity), but will also want to control the other Marmoset inputs by substance. But as soon as I have to map one input manually, the whole idea of substances is obsolete.

    By allowing substances to map all inputs, the substance integration would be complete.
  • EarthQuake
    Thanks for the feedback guys, I've logged it in our suggestion system.
  • Olli.
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    Olli. polycounter lvl 8
    I cant remember if i've brought this up but have the problems with metalness been reported yet?

    for example, if you have a dark surface like paint, and you want to add a thin scratch to this which breaks the paint and shows the metal underneath, you get a white outline around the scratch. I can set up an example tomorrow im a little bad at explaining with words.

    I think this has something to do with the weird curve at which the metalness map works. The difference between black and 50% grey is barely noticeable.


    Also for as a feature request, an easy render mode selector would be a godsend in toolbag. Switching between lit/unlit mode would be my main request, but stuff like specular toggle, overdraw, and whatever else you can think of wouldnt hurt. The viewer has something similar to this with the texture decomposition, and even that would be a great start in toolbag.

    Also it'd be nice to be able to adjust the newtons rings intensity per-pixel (since usually you dont want that on the whole model)

    oh and a node based linear non-destructive shader editor
  • EarthQuake
    Olli. wrote: »
    I cant remember if i've brought this up but have the problems with metalness been reported yet?

    for example, if you have a dark surface like paint, and you want to add a thin scratch to this which breaks the paint and shows the metal underneath, you get a white outline around the scratch. I can set up an example tomorrow im a little bad at explaining with words.

    I think this has something to do with the weird curve at which the metalness map works. The difference between black and 50% grey is barely noticeable.

    This is actually an artifact that is inherent to the metalness workflow. The only way to get rid of it is to use the spec workflow. UE4, substance, etc show the same issue.
    Also for as a feature request, an easy render mode selector would be a godsend in toolbag. Switching between lit/unlit mode would be my main request, but stuff like specular toggle, overdraw, and whatever else you can think of wouldnt hurt. The viewer has something similar to this with the texture decomposition, and even that would be a great start in toolbag.

    Also it'd be nice to be able to adjust the newtons rings intensity per-pixel (since usually you dont want that on the whole model)

    oh and a node based linear non-destructive shader editor
  • purehilarity
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    purehilarity polycounter lvl 6
    Hello,

    I'm loving Marmoset and have gotten my work to purchase it. We've been using it on a stop motion film for look dev which is pretty exciting and maybe the first usage of it for this purpose (who knows?). Everyone's really impressed and happy with it. I just had a couple teeny feature suggestions that may or may not be something that interest you:

    1. Custom Watermark - I was using the trial at first and had assumed I could put my own watermark for the project once purchased but it seems to just be the Marmoset one. Not a big deal but it's worth throwing out there!

    2. Double click to create a new shader. Cinema 4D does this and I always just thought it was a super simple and satisfying way to create a shader. Again, very insignificant but nice nonetheless!

    3. Tile textures in the program. Not sure if this is there and I missed it, and I know since most people use it for games this isn't too important, but for quick look dev being able to interactively tile the texture with a slider would be great for me. I like using this program for look development because the feedback is so immediate, but having to go into photoshop and scale and tile images breaks the flow really.

    4. This may be a user error but when I export from Zbrush things come in flipped always. Would be cool if there was a way to replace an existing model with a new iteration that retains the transforms and materials applied to it. I'm having to do a lot of quick iterations and I'd find this uber handy. Again, may be something that doesn't interest game artists which seems to be your core demographic.

    Thanks for everything and keep up the great work. Can't wait to see how things progress from here.
  • EarthQuake
    Hello,

    I'm loving Marmoset and have gotten my work to purchase it. We've been using it on a stop motion film for look dev which is pretty exciting and maybe the first usage of it for this purpose (who knows?). Everyone's really impressed and happy with it. I just had a couple teeny feature suggestions that may or may not be something that interest you:

    1. Custom Watermark - I was using the trial at first and had assumed I could put my own watermark for the project once purchased but it seems to just be the Marmoset one. Not a big deal but it's worth throwing out there!

    You can actually hack this in yourself. go to data/gui/viewport/ and edit watermark.tga to replace it with your own image.
    2. Double click to create a new shader. Cinema 4D does this and I always just thought it was a super simple and satisfying way to create a shader. Again, very insignificant but nice nonetheless!

    3. Tile textures in the program. Not sure if this is there and I missed it, and I know since most people use it for games this isn't too important, but for quick look dev being able to interactively tile the texture with a slider would be great for me. I like using this program for look development because the feedback is so immediate, but having to go into photoshop and scale and tile images breaks the flow really.

    Texture tiling is not support at this time. You'll have to set up tiling with your UVs in your 3D modeling app.
    4. This may be a user error but when I export from Zbrush things come in flipped always. Would be cool if there was a way to replace an existing model with a new iteration that retains the transforms and materials applied to it. I'm having to do a lot of quick iterations and I'd find this uber handy. Again, may be something that doesn't interest game artists which seems to be your core demographic.

    In 2.08 we'll have auto mesh reloading as well as mesh replacing, which makes iterations a lot easier.
    Thanks for everything and keep up the great work. Can't wait to see how things progress from here.

    Thanks to you for the feedback, I've added your requests to our suggestion list.
  • purehilarity
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    purehilarity polycounter lvl 6
    Thank you very much! The watermark thing worked great. Is there a way to use an image as a background but still take the lighting from an HDRI? I know you can use a solid color.
  • EarthQuake
    Not directly inside of Toolbag, but you can save out an image with alpha channel (in capture settings, ctrl+p, make sure to use tga or psd and enable transparency), and composite in a background image in photoshop.
  • robert.nally
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    robert.nally polycounter lvl 12
    Just wanted to make a request for the Outline (Edge Detection) feature that is in the first version of Marmoset.
  • MM
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    MM polycounter lvl 17
    sky/light locking doesnt seem to work in the viewer after the 2.08 update.
  • walter
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    walter polycounter lvl 14
    Import Camera with the FBX format: NICE !
    Locking the camera: NICE !
    2 usefull features for a validation process.
    It lack only one thing, to display a Safe Frame (resolution gate in Maya) of the resolution capture.
    Many Thanks !
  • Bek
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    Bek interpolator
    So I noticed if I import a mesh that has no UV's I get different vertex counts if I import that same mesh multiple times — is tb2 doing some auto-UV process when you import if no UV's are found? That's the only thing I can think to explain why I can import the same mesh multiple times and get wildly different vertex counts (especially when the ASCII files show no difference & another tool that accounts for splits tells me they're identical); sometimes its a tiny bit more, sometimes its more than triple.

    If so, any way to disable this? If it's not meant to do that and sounds like a bug; I tested with FBX, DAE and OBJ with various meshes. Adding UV's stopped this behaviour.
  • Olli.
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    Olli. polycounter lvl 8
    Would it be possible to consider a semi-offline approach for some more advanced render stuff like raytracing reflections and better AO? (non-screenspace) Something along the lines of BPR from zBrush.
    Itd really help get some super nice stills out of marmoset since the screenspace implementations for AO and local reflections fall short quite often.

    On an unrelated note, it would be nice if we could set tangent space for all subobjects in a group, since the objects I usually work on have 10-20 subobjects, and having to manually change the tangent space for all of them individually is really tedious if I have to constantly reimport the mesh.
  • EarthQuake
    Olli. wrote: »
    Would it be possible to consider a semi-offline approach for some more advanced render stuff like raytracing reflections and better AO? (non-screenspace) Something along the lines of BPR from zBrush.
    Itd really help get some super nice stills out of marmoset since the screenspace implementations for AO and local reflections fall short quite often.

    We are working on some stuff that should improve reflections and occlusion, early dev though so not ETA yet, sorry!
    On an unrelated note, it would be nice if we could set tangent space for all subobjects in a group, since the objects I usually work on have 10-20 subobjects, and having to manually change the tangent space for all of them individually is really tedious if I have to constantly reimport the mesh.

    If you go to edit->preferences you'll find a dropdown to select your default tangent space, so if you typically bake with a specific baker, set your TS there and you won't have to change it for every mesh.
  • Olli.
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    Olli. polycounter lvl 8
    Hmm the FBX files I use come with their own tangent space, which is used instead of the default setting.

    edit: also I seem to recall there used to be an "apply" button in the material pallet. Was pretty useful for applying a material to multiple subobjects at once. Its gone now though :(
  • EarthQuake
    Olli. wrote: »
    Hmm the FBX files I use come with their own tangent space, which is used instead of the default setting.

    edit: also I seem to recall there used to be an "apply" button in the material pallet. Was pretty useful for applying a material to multiple subobjects at once. Its gone now though :(

    Ah yeah, when custom tangents are found in a file they would be read by default.

    The apply button has been moved to the material menu, along with a new feature to clear unused materials as well.
  • Bek
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    Bek interpolator
    Regarding Marmoset Viewer: How about an option on export for the scene to load into the layers view automatically / by default?
  • Joost
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    Joost polycount sponsor
    I think I found a bug. When you open a saved scene it resets the Srgb option for all the textures.
  • EarthQuake
    Joost wrote: »
    I think I found a bug. When you open a saved scene it resets the Srgb option for all the textures.

    Interesting, what file format are you using? Do you happen to be using 16 or 32 bit textures?
  • Joost
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    Joost polycount sponsor
    16 bit psd. Probably shouldn't be using that anyway but Ddo was giving me weird results when I used other file formats.
  • repete
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    repete polycounter lvl 6
    auto mesh update :poly121:

    757909.gif

    Thanks for adding this
  • mastajappa
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    mastajappa polycounter lvl 9
    Idd auto mesh update is awesome!
  • mastajappa
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    mastajappa polycounter lvl 9
    I have some workflow improvement suggestions;

    • Use light as a camera, for easy control over light setups (There is a workaround by using a light inside a camera and then drag the light back out, but Toolbag sometimes crashes when I do this)
    • Multi select materials for organisation, deletion and exporting.
    • A while ago I mentioned stereo rendering an image when capturing, this would be awesome.
    • Is it also possible to create an output for a small part of the camera movement? Or even create a tween setup?
    Thanks for the fog btw this one is really nice.
  • EarthQuake
    mastajappa wrote: »
    I have some workflow improvement suggestions;

    • Use light as a camera, for easy control over light setups (There is a workaround by using a light inside a camera and then drag the light back out, but Toolbag sometimes crashes when I do this)
    • Multi select materials for organisation, deletion and exporting.
    • A while ago I mentioned stereo rendering an image when capturing, this would be awesome.
    • Is it also possible to create an output for a small part of the camera movement? Or even create a tween setup?
    Thanks for the fog btw this one is really nice.

    Thanks for the feedback!

    Currently it is not possible to output a small section of the camera output, what I have done in the past is calculate how many frames I need and simply stop the turntable export when it's rendered enough. Not ideal, but it works. We're working on an animation system that should support camera animation and replace the turntable system entirely, but this is still a ways off.
  • mastajappa
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    mastajappa polycounter lvl 9
    Thanks for the headsup. Love to see some features added and indeed I've figured out some workarounds which look a lot like the one you said. Keep up the great work.
  • green-coder
    A very much needed feature would be to allow users to automate the process of recreating shaders inside Marmoset's Toolbag 2.

    We have a huge quantity of shaders on a huge quantity of meshes, and if we want to export them to Toolbag 2 it would take a lot of effort for the artists.

    One artist proposed to use special names for the different textures which could be recognized by Toolbag 2 and automatically assign them to the texture slots, for example textures which include the string "albedo" or "normal" or "roughness" ... I think that it is a good idea.

    Another way would be to have an API so that external programmers could create themselves the material files used by Toolbag 2.
  • Chase
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    Chase polycounter lvl 9
    I seem to have a bug when I re-import my normal map. I have to reselect the tangent space by flipping through all the choices before going back to the 3ds Max option.
  • EarthQuake
    A very much needed feature would be to allow users to automate the process of recreating shaders inside Marmoset's Toolbag 2.

    We have a huge quantity of shaders on a huge quantity of meshes, and if we want to export them to Toolbag 2 it would take a lot of effort for the artists.

    One artist proposed to use special names for the different textures which could be recognized by Toolbag 2 and automatically assign them to the texture slots, for example textures which include the string "albedo" or "normal" or "roughness" ... I think that it is a good idea.

    Another way would be to have an API so that external programmers could create themselves the material files used by Toolbag 2.

    Thanks for the feedback, I've added it to our internal suggestion list.
  • EarthQuake
    Chase wrote: »
    I seem to have a bug when I re-import my normal map. I have to reselect the tangent space by flipping through all the choices before going back to the 3ds Max option.

    Can you give me more information on this one? I haven't been able to reproduce it.

    Where are you baking your normal map?
    What file format is your mesh?
    Is mesh auto-reload enabled?
    Is your mesh being exported with tangents and bi-normals?

    Reloading a texture requiring you to reselect tangent space is a confusing issue, as tangent space is a mesh property, not a material or texture property. Are you sure it's the texture reloading and not the mesh that is causing the issue?
  • Brian123
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    Brian123 polycounter lvl 5
    Might I suggest additional features for organizing materials?

    Issues:
    Right now I have a scene with a long list of materials, and while it's alphabetical, I still have to hunt for what I'm looking for, often scrolling past it due to the large thumbnails limiting how many you can see at once without dragging the interface window down. Often the thumbnails are too vague to be of any use for identification.

    Also, the visible area for names is too narrow. I will only see the first half that can be the same as another material.

    Suggestions:
    It would be great if we could switch to a list view with small or no thumbnails, but offer an even larger thumbnail by hovering over the name. Also offer group folders.

    I have to check, but is there quick way to select a material of a mesh?
  • thomasp
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    thomasp hero character
    a few notes from me, having worked with toolbag quite a bit over the last year or so -

    merge scene:
    i mentioned this before somewhere here but to emphasize again - this would be really helpful and my top most wanted feature. right now if i have several scenes full of assets to merge those there's no way other than going back to the DCC application and re-exporting everything again into a new scene, assign materials manually and so on. if we use toolbag as a lookdev environment then things like lighting can change all the time, updating that across multiple scenes is painful in the current state.
    to make this useful for my purpose i'm thinking keeping a base scene that only contains the light setup and just merging in existing scenes full of assets that contain no lighting.

    copy/paste of cameras/lights and export of their entire settings:
    i think it would be a great timesaver if we were able to duplicate cameras and lights like you would in a DCC application where the copy inherits the exact position and alignment as the original for you to start from ( and preferably also gets created in the same group/folder). also, it would be handy to save/export presets or settings much like we can do with materials to ensure e.g. all cameras use the same post process settings, etc. right now it's a lot of going through long panels and cross checking values.
    bonus points for the ability to select a bunch of cameras or lights of the same type and group-adjusting their values.

    fat interface drag handles:
    this is a pet peeve of mine - the drag handles used to resize the interface elements are pretty narrow and hard to hit. especially when the app already lags a bit with a complex scene in fullscreen on a 27 inch screen or larger.

    ability to view scene from a light's position/orientation:
    this would be handy for accurate placement i think. i use it all the time when setting up lighting in a DCC app. much less fiddly than rotating a spot light around in the 3d view.

    http://polycount.com/discussion/157918/2-08-turntable-bug#latest
    we use this technique all the time in offline renders to show off the surface. i'm also relatively sure (but unable to check anymore) that this was a feature supported in toolbag 1. can we have that, pretty please?

    lastly i'm wondering if it would be possible at all to have something like a pause button in toolbag?
    i'm thinking keyshot here. one that stops all calculations taking place in the app, stops updating the image completely. the reason i'm asking is that toolbag takes alot of resources and as such is in my experience not really suited to be kept in the background, even in a minimized state. it even fights with photoshop. right now i'm opening and closing it very frequently during the day because of this.


  • EarthQuake
    Brian,

    Thanks for the suggestions, I've added them to our list of features to consider. Currently there is no way to select a material that is applied to a mesh.

    Thomas,

    RE Copy/paste cameras/lights: you can do this currently, ctrl+d to duplicate or scene->duplicate selection. No saving/loading at this time though.

    RE Pause button: Toolbag 2 automatically stops rendering when you're in a different app or when minimized, if this isn't working for you there may be a driver or software conflict. Another user was having trouble with Photoshop performance when Toolbag 2 was running, and it turned out the problem was using a non-aero Windows theme (such as the windows classic theme). So I would recommend switching to an aero theme if you're not already using one. Otherwise, any information you can give that would help us reproduce this issue would be helpful.

    RE look through light: Here's a work around, create a new light, and a new camera, make sure the camera has the same position and rotation as the light, and then drag the camera onto the light to parent it. Now, when you rotate the light, the camera will match the position and allow you to look through it. Not exactly what you want I'm sure, but it should work. If you want the camera's position to control the light, do the reverse and drag the light onto the camera.

    I've add all of your suggestions to our suggestion lists, thanks!
  • thomasp
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    thomasp hero character
    Joe, thanks for the hint about aero. indeed i am running on windows 'classic' (not 'classy') here. i am also using virtual desktops btw.
    i missed the duplicate functionality completely, duh. putting it in the edit menu and assigning it to CTRL C/V might help?

    as always, thanks for the prompt feedback!

  • mazz423
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    mazz423 polycounter lvl 9
    Not sure if this has been suggested already and I've just not seen it, but a feature I've been craving the last couple projects I've worked on would be some means of doing some colour adjustments to skyboxes independently of the rest of the scene.
    Ideally something comparable to the colour balance adjustments you get in photoshop, or even something as simple as a hue/ saturation slider would be great.
  • malcolm
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    malcolm polycount sponsor
    Hey EARTHQUAKE, merry Christmas. Just following up on refraction, I still have a model I'd like to render out and am waiting for refraction to do some water droplets made out of geometry. Just wondering if that is still on the list.
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