Maybe it’s a bit of a loaded question because this is a blender oriented forum, so there’s a bit of a bias.
Anyway, for what i’ve gathered, character artists focusing on games render their works on marmoset because it’s a real time engine that’s very easy to setup and produces results both pleasing to the eyes and relatively fast.
Well, eevee is also a realtime engine. It doesn’t have the super easy presets for product presentations and has way more options to it, but with the right .blend file and maybe some addons, could it replace marmoset or is there any specific function that marmoset has that makes it harder to replace in a pipeline?
Eevee has the power to bench toolbag, and it’s backed by blender’s power which is great.
In the end the more optimized will win. who runs faster, who can handle more polygons smoothly, fancy features and whatnot.
Interface and presets are the biggest problem, though. Sometimes focus beats number of features, and that beginner’s barrier is something blender struggled until 2.79 (it isn’t as intuitive as, say, sculptris for example)
Maybe if someone in that blender 123 project made a slimmed down and streamlined version just for this, we’d have an intresting scenario in our hands, don’t you think?
Toolbag probably has the best baker out there. There’s a quick loader that reads the names of the meshes and loads them into high or low poly. The meshes are also automatically reloaded when changes are made to them.
There’s a ton of map types. And you can preview them in the viewport…
You can drag and drop meshes into the outliner.
Drag and drop textures into the slots. DnD material onto a mesh.
You can position lights by clicking on the hdri.
There’s a lot more.
I think those features should be possible in Blender, but we probably won’t see them until 2.81 or something.
Finally, the biggest feature imo is the ability to export out a Viewer file which can be embedded online. We see these all over Artstation.
Indeed, the exporter function from Marmoset is a nice feature.
For Blender, you could for example use Blend4web to export webgl files.
Another way would be to use the sketchfab exporter which is included since 2.70.
Toolbag allows moving files to Unity (not tested no idea about its limitations)
and to UE4 Projects. The converter for UE4 is rudimentary and many material-textures aren´t converted/working. This feature might be easily challenged by a Blender script.
I think that Blender will be easier to use for navigating around (and in) large environments,quickly changing animations while the files are being shown and to my knowledge, adding and using simulations and particles aren´t possible with Toolbag.
Toolbag for me looks more like a portfolio program it allows you to make beautiful renders and then directly export those to artstation as images or turnaround 3d interactive models.
Blender can do this same ofcourse but you have to use sketchfab or something else to have interactive 3d models. Also toolbag is best baker in my opinion (quality wise) even better than painter/designer.
Well, main problem with EEVEE is that when you assign baked normal map to low poly mesh which have some mirrored parts (UV islands), it doesn’t show up in proper way - normal map is flipped on mirrored parts (flipping green channel doesn’t help, not-mirrored parts are showing OK). I tested it many times in different engines and it works fine. I’m 100% sure i’m not wrong, the problem is on the EEVEE/Blender side. It would be cool to fix it
I’ve just purchased Toolbag. I like Eevee, but I dislike the necessary preparation hassle, including proper placement of Irradiance Probes, Reflection Probes, tons of render settings, material settings, shadow settings, indirect light baking and what not.
I like the quality of Toolbag’s renderings, and the GI in version 3 is voxel-based. With high quality settings the results are quite impressive.
They’ve both got advantages and disadvantages.
Painter is lagging behind Designer’s baker, even, which has a few more texture types (and opacity baking!) and is GPu accelerated.
But even when just comparing it to Toolbag, it lacks the skew correction, realtime updates of bakes, source smoothing, and most importantly: its AO is pretty bad. Toolbag has more options, sure, but even with those disabled the quality’s lacking in SP.
