Creating Beautiful Real-Time Renders in Marmoset Toolbag 3
Awesome Tools, Marmoset Toolbag
A few weeks back I went over a cool kit in Unreal Engine 4 using Marmoset Toolbag, you can check it out here:
Over at GameTextures we have used Marmoset for our site renders for YEARS. It consistently outputs great results and its scenes are easy to manipulate.
The renderer comes with a lot of power, not just for rendering the basic spheres and cubes that we used it for. If anything the strengths of Marmoset were wasted on us.
We built Marmoset into our pipeline partly because the ability to adjust lighting on the fly was an easy sell. The most recent version, Marmoset 3, comes with a whole suite of tools for basic animation, larger and more comprehensive scenes, and the ability to work in both metallic and specular workflows.
It also features incredibly fast GPU based High to Low Poly Texture baking, although that is for another time.
Scenes are easy to build out in the program.
Multiple materials can be created and applied to your scene, each one with its own specific settings.
The final result can end up looking amazing. In this scene Matt Dirks, our material master, made this scene to test out some of our latest Japanese Themed Materials. The results speak for themselves and this is not even the final render (we’re saving it for a future post).
Marmoset looks a bit pricey at face value but with a perpetual license (NO SUBSCRIPTION), dozens of tools built around bridging the gap between it and the major game engines, and python support for complete pipeline integration, it’s well worth the cost.
Didn’t we also mention fast GPU Texture Bakes?
Some Pros to force your hand
- Easy to output high quality renders or animations
- Physically Accurate, Real-Time lighting with Real Time Voxel GI solution
- High Quality, High Speed Texture baker
- Perpetual License
Some cons to take away.
- Cost can seem like a lot up front for what is primarily a visualization tool
- Is only useful for art, is not a full game engine
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