To show our love, we’ve released a free update for Valentine’s day! Toolbag 3.02 adds a number of new features and bug fixes. Highlighting the release is material animation support and a shiny new refraction shader. The Baker has seen its share of attention too, including a number of handy new additions, improvements, and fixes.

Download the latest installer from the Toolbag 3 product page, or launch Toolbag 3 to get the patch.

Animated Materials


With Autokey enabled, changes to your materials will be recorded. You can add and edit keyframes manually with the Keyframe Editor as well. Most material parameters are supported, such as Albedo Color, Emissive, UV tiling, and more.

Refraction Shader in Action


The refraction shader is perfect for glass, liquids, and transparent/refractive materials of various sorts.

Refraction Shader Setup


The refraction shader can be found in the Transparency module and has parameters to set the Index of Refraction, Caustics, and load a mask to blend between the Refraction and standard Lambertian shading models.

The refraction shader works best when each element is a separate object, for instance both the glass and liquid are separate objects, which enables the refraction shader to sort properly. For something like car windows, make sure to split each window up so that you can see the far windows through the near ones.

And More!

Here is the full list of changes:

Feature Additions:

  • Material Animation!
  • Refraction Shader!
  • Smart texture loading, drag textures onto palette to create new material, or onto existing material to load
  • Baker “Smooth Filter” option for geometry smoothing
  • EXR file output for screenshots and animation
  • Show/hide toggle buttons for high/low baker objects
  • New lights are now auto-placed in camera direction
  • Color-over-time display for RGB keyframes

Bug Fixes:

  • Many baker fixes:
    • Baker auto reloads now retain all settings
    • Cage vertex offset directions are now better
    • Texture tiling support for material bakes
    • Cage offset is now consistent with display
    • Improved smart-load suffix & name matching
    • Baker viewport preview now works with wireframes
  • Improved tablet support, if you’re having issues with your tablet
  • try the Tablet-Friendly Input setting in Edit-> Preferences
  • Various stability fixes
  • Animation Property view display has been tweaked
  • Animation fixes for object transforms
  • Scenes with > 32 lights now display (more) correctly
  • Improved Local Reflections to omit background image correctly
  • Viewer preview option now more reliable
  • Better support for writing more compatible layered PSD files
  • Support for ArtStation pro file size limits
  • Better scaled UI appearance
  • Drag & drop now works with scaled UI
  • Better functioning progress bar for long jobs

See the complete Toolbag version history here.