Introduction & Project Beginnings

Hello, I’m Derek Edwards, a Senior Character Artist at Certain Affinity. I’ve been in the game industry for 10 years and worked on many titles such as Halo Infinite and the MX vs ATV series. My experience up to this point has required me to be flexible and tackle most areas of art production, so I would consider myself a generalist while having specialized in hard surface art throughout my career. Regardless of the task, Toolbag has always helped me get things done. I’ve been excited to try the texturing workflow since it was released, so let’s dive in!

I modeled this “Scooty Tank” last year based on @gatring3‘s concept on X. The model is not fancy in detail, but I thought it would be good for texturing in Marmoset Toolbag.

Birdseye Benefits of Using Toolbag

First and foremost, the main pro of using Toolbag was the end-to-end pipeline to bake, texture, and render, which significantly shortened the iteration loop. Inevitably, at some point when making an asset, you’ll often have to go back and tweak UVs or add new details that require a repack or rebake, and it was really helpful not to have to change through apps to iterate.

Toolbag has a robust integrated Library of very nice smart materials, brushes, grunge maps, patterns, and more, which you can simply download from the Library window (and in bulk). The Library’s Materials are a great starting point in a Texture Project, and studying a Smart Material’s layer and mask structure is a great way to learn how to build complex mask stacks.

Brushing Over Brushes

Brushes in Toolbag have some noteworthy features:

  • Most brush parameters in the Tool Settings window have a jitter setting beyond just size, angle, and flow (i.e., hardness, opacity, spacing jitter).
  • The Textures in the Brushes folder are sprite sheets that cycle as you paint, resulting in more variation and less discernible repeating, regardless of jitter settings.
  • With the “Use Normal Map for Culling” setting in Tool Settings enabled (default) and a super low Backface Culling setting, you can paint right over the model, and only baked-in indents will be filled with minimal to no cleanup.

Selection Tools Galore

Selecting any Paint layer displays a slew of selection tools, such as Marquee, Object, and Magic Wand. Using these will snag an active selection region both in the 3D viewport and UV view, and tools like the brush or gradient tool will be constrained to the region, just as in Photoshop. This is great for quick isolated painting without needing to set up a mask.

  1. Other areas of the Texture Project are grayed out, and crawling ants identify the selection where tool actions are isolated without masking.
  2. The UVs for these rails are stacked, so both sides are selected.

The Power of Infinite Layering

One of the coolest features of Toolbag’s Texture Projects is how the layer stack works. You get used to the mask layers climbing upward instead of below the mask pretty quickly (they still process top-down), and using masks, processors, and adjustments on mask layers is super flexible!

  1. Masks can have masks! Here’s a simple dirt fill layer with a mask stack. Note that each processor (generator), fill, or paint layer can have its own masks/processors/levels, etc., affording a granular level of control.

Some cool stuff about layers:

  • On a Fill layer, you can choose whether to reference a material for each channel or not. Each channel comes with inversion and contrast settings out of the box.
  • Processor layers are like Substance Painter generators but more flexible. And remember, they can have their own masks and processors!
  1. Processors (i.e., Dirt) function like Painter generators, except they use a texture from the outset. This is great because you can dial in the settings to get the amount and placement you like, then swap through the built-in grunge maps or use your own to get the look you want!

Hiding and isolating objects is slightly different but ultimately more flexible than Painter. Hiding the Texture Project doesn’t do anything like hiding the Texture Set would do in Painter. Instead, you simply hide at the object level, as you normally do in Toolbag. With models that have a ton of objects, as most do, it might be worth combining them into fewer pieces for the sake of isolation, but you have the flexibility to choose based on the project.

Pro Tips for Painting Performance

Of course, where there are pros, there are some cons. The big two for me were that the Texture Projects are pretty VRAM hungry since you need to have one per material (think of them as texture sets, each with their own layer stack), so the scene crashes occasionally, and the brush engine can lag when painting in large mask stacks. Fortunately, Toolbag has a good autosave that will prevent you from losing more than a few minutes of work, but there were a few things that helped limit crashes:

  • Work with texture projects while in Raster render mode – you can easily toggle between Ray-Tracing and Raster with Ctrl+R to check final render quality while you work.
  • Reduce VRAM usage by reducing the Texture Project’s Viewport Resolution setting – this reduces the display resolution of textures in the viewport to boost interactive performance, but all paint data and final output images are saved at full project resolution.
  • Try closing other 3D applications before you start up Toolbag. This will allow your OS to dedicate more VRAM to the current application.
  • Consider saving a separate file for your bake scene and deleting the baker. This frees up a little VRAM; you can always reopen your bake scene for rebakes, and your texturing scene will update automatically when it is opened.
  • Save frequently (and enable Autosave in your app preferences)!

To Round Things Off

I had fun trying out texture painting in Toolbag, and will continue using it for personal projects. It’s a very competitive alternative to other tools, and I prefer baking and rendering in Toolbag anyway. Plus, building out lighting and render cameras as you’re texturing is handy in informing about colors/roughness values and where more detail is needed. Thanks for reading!

Check out my portfolio on Artstation, most of which was rendered in Toolbag! To learn how to use Toolbag to texture your assets, check out the numerous video tutorials on Marmoset’s YouTube channel.

We would like to thank Derek Edwards for writing this breakdown. Begin a free 30-day trial for Marmoset Toolbag today, and start texturing your own 3D artwork with the industry’s favorite all-in-one baking, texturing, and rendering tools.

If you’re interested in collaborating on a tutorial or breakdown article, please send us your pitch and a link to your artwork to submissions@marmoset.co.