Mastering Portfolio-Ready Material Renders: Marmoset Toolbag 3.06

okay so this is the second time I recorded this because OBS decided to only record half of each segment that I made so let's hope this one goes well okay so in kind of this tutorial we're gonna kind of shift the focus on what we've been doing for designer materials and we're gonna figure out and learn how we can take all of those maps that we've made in designer and basically render them out to make some nice beauty shots like you can see on art station and oh really art station I don't know where anyone else puts their stuff online to be honest so I'm using marmoset toolbag 3.06 for this and anything that I'm showing you today should be relatively applicable on pretty much most kind of current versions of marmoset toolbag I know I'm a version or two behind and even a couple versions earlier than 3.06 should be able to do all of this just as well if not I mean you'll probably yell at me in the comments anyway so yeah you're gonna do that too and so we're gonna want to import our model or our mesh to be able to render our Maps onto and so I've actually got a sphere mesh that I'm going to give you guys for free on my patreon if you take a look in the link below you can get it for free so you can follow along and if you do that all you're gonna get is this guy right here and so this guy has been UV unwrapped to be able to fit our material across just like it does in substance designer so I'm not going to show you in this tutorial how to actually unwrap it but instead I'll just give you away my own for free so now that we've got this guy in here I want to just kind of explain what's going on in the viewport here so up on the top left we've got our Explorer tab here or whatever it's called in marmoset but equivalent to the Explorer tab in substance designer we've got our properties tab down here where we have all the properties for everything that we select in the middle we've got our 3d viewport and the way to navigate is by Alt + left click to orbit Alt + middle mouse button to pan and shift and right click to rotate your HDRI and then of course zooming in and out is the scroll wheel our timeline for if we do any animations which I think we'll be doing at the end of this tutorial or at least showing you how to set that up in the top right we've got our materials section and right now you can see that we've got our default material and if I click on that guy we've got all of the parameters for our material down below here so now that we've set all that up I want to go ahead and I'm just going to create a new material you're gonna call this one snow and I'm just going to drag that guy in on top and nothing's gonna change because they're basically the same base material but we're going to be able to play around with these parameters for our snow material here and you can see the first one that we're getting right now is the surface and you can see that normal map is checked off it is our normals so I'm going to click on this little box here navigate to where I've got my textures and I'm going to select our normal map and so a we caution marmoset uses the OpenGL normal format for their normal maps so if you're bringing in a direct X which I believe is the default in substance designer all you'll have to do is come into this guy here and you're going to want to flip the y channel and it's going to look a little weird on my normal map because mine is OpenGL already but if you bring in a DirectX you just want to make sure you flip the Y otherwise if it's OpenGL you're good to go so the next one is our micro surface information and I think by default this might be set to glossiness but I like to use a roughness map so if we if you have the option you can just go there and select roughness map and then we click this guy and go roughness if you are stuck to glossiness here all you have to do is still in put your roughness map and then you can just click on invert and it's going to do the exact same thing as your roughness map would I'm just gonna leave mine on roughness and then you can see that we can play around with the overall roughness of this material using our roughness map you the next one is our albedo and going to select my base color and then I'm going to skip over diffusion for now we're gonna cover that kind of after we've done all the lighting and everything for our material and it's going to make a lot more sense once we have so I'm skipping over to reflectivity and so by default this might be set to specular for you because we're using the metalness roughness workflow at least I am I want to set this to metalness and we can either just hit invert or we can slide this metalness slider all the way down because none of this is actually metal and by default it's going to just select everything as being metal because we have not a mask to denote any areas of metalness because there's nothing metal so I'm just going to bring that all the way down and then lastly I want to come down to occlusion and you can see it's kind of grayed out we can't select it because we have to click on this little arrow and hit occlusion and that's going to open the drop-down and so we're going to be able to use this for our aiming occlusion map and if I click on that guy there and come up to a mean occlusion you can see immediately what its gonna do is just place our ambient occlusion overtop here and it's a little bit harsh for what it is so I kind of dropped that down by half just so you get a little bit more of the the shadow information so that it's actually visible but it really doesn't have as much influence as it does before because it looks kind of stylized if we leave it at one it's also not really physically accurate as well and so I also want to come down here to our cavity map and I just plugged this guy in as well just to give a little bit of added information and so the diffuse in the cavity are basically just how much this has on the diffuse light or a mean occlusion and how much this has on these specular reflections of our material so it's going to be a little hard to demonstrate more so the the specular reflections but if I come back up to the roughness and I bring this all the way down as I increase and decrease the specular cavity in the areas where our aim inclusion is actually affecting mostly you can see that it's dimming the reflections or not having any influence over them so I like to have this kind of round point two-five just that it has a little bit of an effect but not too much I also want to if I bring up the roughness again I want to alter the diffuse because you can see we're having the same issue where it looks really harsh and it kind of just looks stylized at this point and so if I just come into our diffuse cavity here and I bring this guy way down I just want to bring this to around to 0.1 again just so it's affecting a little bit but nothing too crazy there so that's starting to look pretty good so to start off we've basically finished our material here and all of the parameters that we have done here except we're missing kind of one key component to add really arguably kind of the more important features of in this material being the height information you can see that we don't really have any areas to put it because we need to come back up to the top and you can see that we have our substance of division sorry and our displacement so I want to do our P n triangles for our subdivision and then our displacement I'm going to set that to height and this is going to allow us to input our displacement or height same you know two different words for the same thing really our displacement or height map so I'm going to input that guy there going to input that and you can see immediately that's going to pretty much destroy our mesh hair just crunch it because we have such a contrasted height map so if I bring that scale way down you can see now that we're starting to get some height information and if I just click on our mesh here you can see that the tessellations have allowed us to have such a nice robust and high-density mesh and if I decrease that tessellation you can see that still not too bad really except we get some areas of point like that where if we increase the tessellation now we've got this super dense mesh and also if I kind of orbit around kind of starts to chug just a little bit so say you've got your material and you're set up kind of kind of how you like it and you don't really want to go around and start playing with all these features to kind of make it more viable to orbit around your mesh and you know go to different areas different cameras there's a tool up in our viewport here this little rocket ship which is the speedy viewport mode and this allows us to basically bypass all of those features and you can see it just turns them off temporarily while this is enabled and we're going to get kind of the performance of our viewport back to just allow us to move around and navigate a little bit easier without having to affect all of these as well as any post-processing on our cameras and our lights that will kind of take a hit to performance so I'm just gonna bump that down and I'm going to uncheck that guy there you see we're back to normal alright so now that we've got our material and all that sorted out I want to go ahead and I want to kind of play around with the lighting get a little bit of a feel for our HDRI backgrounds and just get a basis for what our kind of are I'll say color scheme is going to be for our lighting so if I come over into our Explorer and I click on the sky tab there you can see that immediately we get this hgri and this is the HDRI that's actually illuminating our scene right now it doesn't quite look like it but come into our backdrop this is going to allow us to change from the actual visualization of our scene here so right now we've got our ambient sky which is basically just using a blurred version and basically only displaying the illumination values or the color values for the light that's actually affecting the scene it's kind of an average of all of the areas of this image it changed it to blurred sky you can see that it's just the image that's blurred the sky here where the actual HDRI image then color and color is just going to be a solid image display and again none of these different modes actually affect the lighting information of our object because it's all using this HDR I it's simply just displaying it visually for us to change kind of the background and the look of the final render so I normally just go with color and for the sake of this tutorial I'm just going to go with solid color as well just to make it easier to visualize what's going on but just keep in mind that whatever image we decide to use here is really what's going to be illuminating our scene and so with that said I want to go ahead and I want to actually change this HDRI because I don't really like the color scheme that's it's got going on here so I'm going to go to presets and this is going to open up a bunch of different skies for us so if you just click on them it's going to ultimately switch them and display all of these different HDRI lighting values over top of our material here you and so I kind of like this one right here the castle sunset so whenever you find one that you like all you have to do is hit done and then we've got this image now as our hgri blading our scene here so you can come in here and affect the of the HTR I make it a little less bright I normally just kind of keep this around one and so we also have this child light brightness and if we bring this up and down it doesn't do anything and that's because we don't have any child lights in our scene so the way that we set up these child lights is if we go into our image here and I just left click you can see immediately we've got this light right in here we've got this little handle over here and you can see that under our sky tab we've basically just created a point light or a directional light for our scene and as I move this around you can see it's going to affect the different areas of our mesh because it's moving around our HDR eye and a 360 degree rotation and you can see that it's going to ultimately adopt the color value of wherever it is located in our HDRI here so that's pretty handy if we kind of want to have some more almost faking global illumination or diffuse reflection and so before we get too invested in that I want to find an area of my material that I think is going to be kind of the more interesting point to view I think here is gonna look really cool for my render so now that I've established an area that I want to basically view for my static shots I'm going to come back into our child light right back down to one because we can actually affect these lights individually and if I come up to their tab up here you can see that I can affect the brightness of this guy right here also change the color as well say if I wanted something that's a little bit more cool than maybe bring that brightness down just to look just a smidge my saturated just a little bit more and then we can also come into our width and you can see if I increase the width of it its effects are very very subtle so you can see if I leave the width all the way down we've got some nice harsh shadows because our basically our size of our light is very small and so it's not encompassing the entirety of our material but as we increase the width we're also basically just increasing the size and so there's gonna be soft or contact with surfaces as well as softer shadows if I bring this down bring it up and so because this is going to be kind of our key light right here I want this to be a little bit softer but not too soft because I really like shadows and how they kind of define a material we can also come into our little gizmos here and we can rotate and change the basically the influence that this light has over our material and it's the same way as if we were to move it in here the only problem is that if I move it in here it's going to ultimately adopt the colors of whatever the HDRI is so if you find that you get an area that you like it and you get a color that you like it's probably better advised to then start manipulating that light with our little gizmos you and so now that I've got kind of that key light or that prominent light kind of in the nice top right corner of my material where I normally like to place them I'm gonna go ahead I'm gonna add more of an ambient light and the way that I like to have my ambient light is kind of almost perpendicular to where our key light is to kind of almost balance it out and give it to kind of almost polar opposite but very similar kind of relationship and so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come back into our hgri and I'm just going to drag this guy around until I kind of find the area that I think kind of fits it and so I think right there's not going to be too bad so if I just bring up the brightness so I can see where it is I want to play around with these gizmos a little bit I'm going to bump down the brightness now that I've found where it is I want to kind of leave it so that it's again kind of polar opposite to up here but I also wanted to be able to reach kind of towards the center almost like a creation of adit where they're just about touching and almost reaching reaching for each other and so I want to affect this color to make it a little bit more of a blue just a kind of softer blue again a little bit of an off-white just because it's gonna be a more ambient color and I like to have a little bit more aqua color as opposed to navy or deep blue just because it kind of fits the atmosphere of this material because it's kind of melting snow melting ice and you don't really get those deeper blues you get those more kind of transparent or sub scattered blue lights and that's also kind of leading into a little bit later when we come back into our diffusion tab here and we play around a little bit with the sub scattering I've got this kind of how I want it I want to make sure there's a little bit find area in between these lights that is just going to be strictly handled by our HDRI image we can play around with the width a little bit you just to kind of get rid of those shadows can play around with the brightness as well and small like that that's starting to look pretty cool all right and so lastly I want to come in here to our sky again and I want to add a little bit of a rim light just so that we can kind of get this nice sharp contrast on our material I just make it look really really kind of chic rim lights make everything look really good and they're really not that hard to do so again I'm going to come in here and immediately I'm going to try and find kind of right in this corner here and it looks like it's kind of this pocket over here if I can find it again there we go so if I just pump that right up it's going to help us kind of find the the area of our mesh that I want to work on I just want to I want to you're just a little bit of the corners not so much down here maybe just a little bit actually maybe I want to play around over here nope I want to go back over here you so now that we've kind of got this nice little corner nice little rim light maybe bump that up a little bit more there we go we again can play around with the width bring down the brightness of it just to get some nice nice streak nice shiny area and that looks pretty cool to me again for your material might require a little bit more refinement but overall this is kind of the process that I use to get our lighting situation all set up by starting with a nice kind of hgri to give us a nice color palette a nice theme that I try and really use just kind of for the middle area I create a fill light top here to give us that nice presenting light that nice shine or glimmer where most of the object is going to be kind of lit from I add a nice fill or ambient light down here to give us a nice contrast in color again kind of that creation of Adam vibe where both of our key and fill lights are kind of just reaching out towards each other but barely grasping and then I like to have this nice little rim light just to add a little bit of a new different kind of effect to the overall composition so now that we're happy with the kind of the lighting situation that we've set up here I'm going to go ahead and start focusing more on our camera and setting that up and making sure that we kind of have it situated where we want to actually take the still renders and the animated renders of our material so you can see up here that we've got our main camera and the way that the cameras actually work is that the viewport is basically in acting or taking place as the camera so I don't want to move the camera really because I like the situation that I've created right now where I've got all of the lighting coming in from the different angles and if I was to move the camera that lighting would have to be basically readjusted or we would have to try and figure out how to readjust the camera come into our Explorer here and hit ctrl D to duplicate our camera name this one render so we know that this is our render camera and this is kind of our moving camera so you can see up in our viewport here that we've got moving and we've got render and if I select that I've actually switching between the two cameras right now but because they're in the same spot we're not going to see really any difference whatsoever so if I rotate around and move this guy you can see why we don't really want to move the camera because one of the consequences of our rim light here is that we need to blow out the back end of this so that we get that nice little sliver of rim light but if I come back up to here and hit render you can see that we're just viewing this camera and not the other camera that is zooming around and you can see that over there that's our render camera right there so I try and keep at least one camera from moving and then however many cameras I want to set up for different angles and different shots so if I go back to our render camera here and I click on render so that we're going to be affecting our render camera we get a whole list of properties so the first one that I go to is under lens I go to the field of view and so with the field of view you've probably seen it in video games and everything hurt at fov this is basically going to kind of change the perspective of our objects in our 3d view here and you can see if I pump this all the way up to you know 150 and I zoom in with this camera it's going to make our object look really kind of distorted and stretched and inversely if I bring this all the way down like one or two and I zoom that guy way out you can see that it's gonna kind of flatten our material a little bit and so I normally try and keep this at around 15 because I want it to be flattened out a little bit just so we can see kind of various areas of our material and we can see as you know a lot of our material as it kind of flattens out but it still allows a little bit of curvature to it so that we can also see the roundedness and how our material kind of goes around our mesh and how it kind of just gels together so I leave our field of view at around 15 I also come down to say frame just so that it better illustrates what we're going to actually be rendering so anything that you can see inside of this rectangle here will be rendered and these black bars on the outside are going to be what is not rendered so we consider this rectangle here as our camera what is visible and so that's just going to help us from accidentally zooming in a little too far and then going oh shoot but I really wanted this information up here so we can see quite easily that it's not going to be rendered so now that we've got those out of the way we can come down to our post fax and this is where a lot of the more interesting and more polish items take place so we can change the exposure of our entire scene here so I'd like to leave that on one contrast up just a little bit and I'd do something like around actually I like it a kind of 0.025 just adds a little bit more contrast lets it stand out from the background a little bit better and we can also play around with the saturation just add a little bit more color into the the entirety of our scene here and maybe that's a little too much so maybe I'm going to do 1.3 again you can see a lot more color that's happening in here you can see almost kind of the different tiers that we're gonna get from our different lighting scenes and then we can also come up and change the curves for our tone mapping and so one thing I like to do is just give it a simple s-curve where we make the darks a little darker make the whites a little whiter making sure that we don't really want to blow out this area too much something simple just like that and then I just had okay so now we've got these effects down here as well and these are very cool because they pretty much change kind of the readability and almost again kind of that high-quality nests that you see on a lot of renders and it's actually not that hard to do but it makes it look so much better so I'm going to go into our sharpen here and the way that sharpen works if I pump this guy all the way up you can see that it's going to take all of our kind of our edge information and all of the details and it's going to extract them and then just kind of really pronounced them a little bit more so the way that I work is I kind of I start at zero I kind of drag it up until I really start to notice like okay this is visibly too sharp and it's no longer clear so I drag that up until I get to about the threshold where I go okay this is starting to get sharp kind of like here and I dial it back just a little bit and so I think maybe 2.25 in this certain instance might look okay and it's going to change from eye to eye person to person and material to material so what might look good to me might not look good to you and what might look good on my material might not look good on yours so it's all circumstantial but that's kind of the way that I do it where I build it up from zero upwards to about the point where I go yeah this doesn't look too good and then I dial it back you know a small percentage and actually looking at it now even 2.25 might be a little too much to dial this back down five looks a little bit better it just helps add a little bit of clarity to our edges it makes things not as muddled next we get bloom and you can see if we crank this guy right up it's gonna make our entire thing pretty shiny which you know kind of looks cool if it we were going for a more of a I don't know gas giant not so much a ball of snow and bloom is a great way to add just a little bit more lighting features to your material and also a very easy way to make your render look like a flaming hot pile of trash so this is one that you I really think need to use very sparingly very conservatively because for a lot of things blur or bloom I should say doesn't quite emphasize it in the way that you want it to so I'm gonna bring the brightness right down I just want to have a little bit of glow especially in our rim light area I also want to just bring the size of that down just a little bit so you can see we get this little bit of bloom just kind of around the edges and so it helps accentuate the final product but it doesn't blow it right out and be the main focus you never want bloom to be your main focus and if it is you're doing it wrong because bloom is great but bloom is a very easy transformative tool to make you become the next Michael Bay get that joke don't worry about it it's not that funny so the next one that I go to is I go down to vignette and vignettes pretty standard but again if we crank this guy up you can see that we're getting kind of the dark edges to really hone in the focus towards the center of our image now we don't actually have anything else in this image other than the material so it's not as important to draw the focus into it but I really like to do it just because I think it adds a nice kind of cohesion over top of everything and so with this gradient or this vignette it's a little bit too well black and not black so I'm going to really crank up the softness of it and then you can see as I dial back the effect of it I kinda just want to have a little bit of the corners just kind of kissing and actually that might be a little bit too much even there we're going to maybe change the softness up to two a little bit of a longer gradient and something like that where the edges are a little bit darker but nothing is quite opaque it's more of a nice linear gradient that's pretty much the gist of the post-effects again you can go in and play around with a whole bunch of things as well up here we've got our focus tab under the lens and this allows us to play with the depth of field and so you can see here that we can also play around with our near and far blur you just add a little bit more of a visual effect on everything however I normally don't use depth of field for my materials just because I find it kind of eliminates you know a nice bloom and our rim as well as our sharpness on various areas and because we don't have much of the scene per se but more so just one material it doesn't really I feel gel with the context of the scene all too nicely so I normally keep the depth of field off but it is there in case you feel that it works so now that we are comfortable with how we're going to present our material with the lighting with the post effects and the camera and all that I want to go back into our kind of the where we started with our material here I want to go back down to our diffusion and so right now by standard it's set on a lambertian and that's fine it looks okay but with snow there's a little bit of subsurface scattering that's actually going on because of how find the actual snow particles are we have the ability to kind of have light almost all not almost actually enter our object and kind of scatter around and then shoot back out and we so we're gonna get a little bit of light bleed actually through our banks of snow and so if we click on a subsurface scattering of these different parameters here our properties and so immediately what I'm drawn to is again our scatter map and so this is going to basically be a mask for the areas that we're going to mask off as not transparent or sorry subsurface scattering and areas that are subsurface scattering and so I'm going to click on this guy here and I have this subsurface snow map here and you can see that the areas that I don't want light to penetrate are going to be the rocks and anywhere that I'm okay with the light penetrating is going to be white and it's going to be the snow so immediately I'm gonna plug that in and you can see that we're going to get if I go to my moving here and we start taking a look you can see that we're gonna start getting it kind of masked off in these visible visible areas where the rocks and the snow connect and as we play around with the depth you can say that see that the snow is gonna kind of become a little bit softer because now it's more susceptible to light bleeding so I'm gonna go back into our render and so that diffusion is a little bit too deep I don't want it to be that deep I still want to get some of my actual snow information there again making sure that our sharpness is not too sharp but again making everything clear so I'm just gonna play around a little bit to find kind of a nice area and if I go back to my moving camera I want to make sure that the nice of the snow is nice and soft but not too incredibly soft that we don't get those nice kind of noise features that's looking pretty cool to render here now I want to go ahead and I want to change some of our render settings because there's a bit of hidden features in our render tab that's going to allow us to just kind of push our material a little bit further and so I'm gonna come up to this green gear here and render and I'm gonna come down into our properties here and I want to go down to global illumination and right now you can see that we don't actually have our global illumination set and the way that global illumination works is basically in their indirect lighting from our material so a light that hits a surface and bounces off and bounces to various other surface areas is basically what we consider indirect lighting and so because we have light coming into here and then bouncing off of these and then around they actually have color influence over each other and how light kind of spills over on a surface just like if you are in a somewhat dark room and there's a light pouring in and you put your hand in front of it all of a sudden that light starts bouncing around the room and actually somewhat illuminating various areas of the room with your hand color one of the biggest things about the global illumination though is that it's very very resource intensive and so that's why by default that's checked off and this is maybe one of the reasons why if you wanted to keep it on you would just use your speedy viewport and you can see the difference that has between making our object just look I'm kind of good and pretty awesome so if I come down here and hopefully my computer doesn't blow up as I'm recording this and we just toggle our enable GI you can see that now the actual mesh is starting to illuminate itself in various areas based off of indirect lighting and we can play around with this brightness as well make it brighter and darker now I don't want it to be as bright per se as one so I bring that up to maybe point five you can see that we're still slightly getting a little bit of orange from our hgri but it's not really present anymore we're using mostly our rim fill and a key or point light and I'm noticing now that maybe with our global illumination it's a little bit too bright in this area a little bit too peaky so all we can do is come down here maybe bump this up to something like 3.8 just change the width a little bit so that it's just not as bright and so now I'm just gonna go up and click our speedy viewport so just to make that the next area a little bit quicker to go and so now I want to just set up a turntable so that we're gonna have our mesh kind of spinning around and doing a 360 so that we can set it up to basically render out in animation and so it's actually very very easy to do and so because I want my mesh to spin I'm going to select our sphere and I'm gonna come up here and I'm going to hit new turntable you can see that it's going to basically put this sphere into this turntable and if I drag this guy around you can see that our lighting information is going to stay consistent and it's going to be our object that rotates around while selecting this turntable as well you can also change the spin rate so at which pace the actual rotation will occur based on your timeline down here you can also change the amount of frames and the length and all that and then if we come up to our capture and go down to settings you can see that we have our settings for our image and so with all of my images I render out I want them to be 1920 by 1080 at a sampling of 16 times and PNG format again there's a bunch of different formats you can choose I just prefer PNG and the same goes for the video 1920 by 1080 16 times you can also change the video formats here two sequences uncompressed because I normally up mine straight to upload mine straight to YouTube I just leave them in video h.264 and if it corrupts I cry but that's okay and then I dial back the quality a little bit just because a lot of times these very long render times because of all of the the post and all the effects that we're putting on as well as the lighting calculations so they can get pretty arduous and so I hit OK and finally if I go up to edit and preferences you can see on our output I've just selected a folder that I want all of these to go into and that will be my art station folder and so now anything that we output and will render out will go into that folder for us so now that we've set up our outputs there I'm gonna go ahead and just uncheck this guy here I'm going to go up to capture and I'm going to just click image and open and it's going to take a quick second to render out and then it's going to open up this image for us it's going to be saved in the area that I have selected for my final output and then we can also go up here capture and we can select a video again it's going to verify that these are the settings that we want so we're going to have three render 300 frames over ten seconds and that's how long our final video format is going to be and so I'm gonna render this out and jump cut for you guys you don't have to wait and I'll see you on the other side okay and so now after that's rendered out we've got our fully realized turntable of our model or our material here and naturally you'll want to spend a little bit more time than I did kind of finally adjusting all of these with the lighting and the post effects but for the most part we've got the bare-bones understanding of how we can take our maps from substance designer and bring them in and actually utilize them to create a nice realistic render in marmoset toolbag [Music]

Channel: Get Learnt w/ Chunck

Views: 25,794

Keywords: 3D, tutorial, marmoset, render, toolbag, material, materials, getlearnt, get learnt, portfolio

Id: _IdOsMowDBc

Length: 47min 25sec (2845 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 29 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Stormshadow130]

Love your videos! Will be sure to check it out.! I found your wood tutorial and moss tutorial very useful for my final major project that I am doing at college :) Ty for your knowledges.

[u/Assemble_Takuyainc]

Great tutorial for people new to rendering and marmoset. Keep up the good work!