Marmoset Toolbag 4. Better than Substance painter and Blender in 2024?

In this video, we dive into the latest version of Marmoset Toolbag 4 and compare it to two of the most popular tools in the industry: Substance Painter and Blender. With new features, improved workflows, and stunning rendering capabilities, could Marmoset Toolbag 4 be the ultimate tool for 3D artists in 2024?
#texturing #marmosettoolbag #trendingon1

[robsanta]

Developers say that their app is "the best" and you wonder what that means. Is it marketing hype? Whatever it is, it's not as subjective as you suppose. It's not just "what works best for you." Were that the case, people would use any old thing.

When a developer says that their app is the best they're trying to say that its the most **"robust"** (ie. full featured and deep). In this sense, it's a bit less subjective.

Substance Painter has the distinction of being deep and feature rich, which is why it is embraced by more artists than any other texturing apps in its class. It handles stylized and PBR texturing jobs equally well. A large catalog of pre-built materials and the ability to work with those created in Substance Designer only makes Substance Painter that much more valuable of an asset, as does its particle texturing.

3DCoat is also capable of PBR and stylized work, although it is far stronger with the latter - making it a favorite among artists and studios doing stylized art. 3DCoat's biggest drawback is its relatively small library of material and a lack of Substance Designer like complex noded materials; The current node system is not built for that task.

Blender is probably the worst texturing tool of the lot. Don't get me wrong. It's capable and probably no worse than what many Cinema4D artists used for years with the BodyPaint module. However, a lack of proper texture layers, limited brushes, no built-in PBR material library, and a more complex entry point for material design overall holds it back.

As far as baking goes, in the end, there's very little difference between the results you'll get whether you bake in Marmoset, Substance, xNormal, or Blender. Every app has their own quirks such as edge quality or minor projection artifacts, all of which usually get fixed via Photoshop or cage tweaks.

Speed-wise, being a Blender user doesn't mean having to accept slow bake times. Just turn on GPU rendering (by itself) in your system settings and bake via Cycles. That bake that took you 20 minutes before might now be done in as little as 30 seconds. Whether or not the alternative such as Marmoset and Substance are faster all depends on your object and settings.

Blender's biggest drawback when it comes to baking is the requirement that the user setup the node network, which really isn't all that hard; Just ever so slightly tedious with bigger projects.

One problem with Marmoset Toolbag is the UI/UX when working on a 4K monitor setup. Toolbag supposedly is a high dpi aware app, but doesn't really scale everything up to a point where human beings can read UI text for prolonged periods of time. Those with poor eyesight might find themselves complaining after a short period of time.

Sadly, Marmoset does not allow you to manually alter UI scaling and compatibility settings do nothing to help either. You either have to suffer or mess with your monitor's resolution/DPI settings; That will (obviously) affect those other apps that DO work well natively in 4K. Numerous users such as myself have asked Marmoset to fix this issue for a while now, but those complaints have fallen on deaf ears. Something to consider if you work in 4K.

As far as real-time rendering goes, the results you'll get from EEVEE vs Toolbag are also comparable. You might see super subtle differences in subsurface scattering, edge handling, or radiance, but you can always tweak one app's setting to get identical results to what you see in the other app.

Marmoset's BIG advantage is actually its ability to publish your work to that viewer, which makes it infinitely easier for studios and prospective employers to inspect your work in real-time. Blender users have no such option and have to render their results instead. On the flipside, being able to publish your project to the real-time viewer also leaves it open to having your assets ripped by nefarious 3rd parties. You take a risk; Numerous artist have had their work stolen in this fashion.

All told, as a texturing suite, Marmoset Toolbag is qualitatively better than Blender, which is not hard to do. However, it is also still relatively new to the texture painting arena and, as such, lacks a lot of the polish and depth that Substance Painter has developed over 8 major releases. Marmoset Toolbag is good, but it probably sits squarely in the middle of the pack. There are worse options, but there are better ones too.

Personally, I'd choose 3DCoat because its texturing tools have been "battle tested" over a longer period of time AND because it is a more versatile suite, allowing you to also model, sculpt, UV, and retopo.

Whenever possible, I avoid the Substance apps simply because there are numerous UI/UX inconsistencies across the suite and the entirety of it is beginning to feel more cumbersome than it once did. It's still highly usable, but it gets clunkier with each version; Pilgway has made some effort in streamlining 3DCoat's UI/UX in recent years. I would also say that Adobe itself might be a deal breaker for some, pushing them away from Substance and into the arms of 3DCoat. That's more of a subjective thing though.

[myNICKnameISgelo]

That's what I've looked for! I'm struggling to learn painter and I'm somewhat capable in texturing inside marmoset. So, I was thinked about why should I go back and forth to marmoset, but you had explained that argument well. Thank you

[MrSheduur]

Best thing about marmoset is the speed and the robust baking mechanism. And if you don't want to export to a seperate DDC for rendering, you can even directly render medium complex scenes directly with it, at quite a good speed with full pathtracing and an amazing denoising method.

[StillenachtD]

I love how Marmoset bakes, allows you to preview the map as well as interactively create the cage but unless I'm mistaken it doesn't support UDIMs which is a real bummer.

[lucasaguirre]

love you man!. been working with Marmoset for years, and this was so useful to see that my current workflow is correct... never saw info so clearly exposed.

[zico]

Great video, very informative! Thanks!

[CGDreamsTutorials]

Thanks for the clear informative video. Im looking at Toolbag as while trying it out the RT Ray tracing with Randomwalk SSS is so nice there is nothing quite as fast yet so simple to set up, Redshift comes close, but for £298 at the time of writing this you can get a permanent perpetual license. It would be nice to see a dedicated hair material and a nodal system for more complex set ups with UDIMs.

[supergather]

Your video was really helpful to me. Thanks!

[kestrelzer]

Thanks for the video, very informative

[universalstadia]

Thanks for delivering this video to me. I think substance painter can also realtime render. I honestly purchased marmoset because it's cheap and easy to use. I actually didn't have to learn any tutorial or any course. I just got it and boom, It's really awesome. Nice video man.

[nareshkumar]

I have extremely low budget laptop (Dual Core i5 5200u, 2.2 GHz to max boost 2.7GHz, Nvidia 820M)😅,
and I've rendered same model in Blender, Arnold, Vray, and Marmoset 4.
And trust me, marmoset ray tracing turned out to be best quality and fastest.

[konamiboys]

Man, best breakdown ever. Am a student learning maya. I would soon be completing. What's your best advice for me? Should I learn blender as a side piece or just ignore and focus on maya. Honestly the news is too much on the internet so am a little confused. I need a little help here. Is blender worth it.

[sylverdetective]

of course its better than painter, especially after Allegorithmic sold out to adobe!! ever since than they been coming out with features nobody even cares about and is little to no use for artists. painter and designer were way better back in the day. Of course everything adobe gets their hands on they wreck!!

[HanSolocambo]

Marmoset better than ... Blender ? It's not a modeler or a sculpting app at all. If you don't use any other app to actually MAKE 3D models, then what are you gonna texture or render in Toolbag ? Wind ?
Compare what's comparable.

[MastermindAtWork]

The ONE thing Marmoset 4 excels at hands down is baking Normal Maps. When I was using their 30 day trial, for 3D characters the high poly details transferred pretty much 1 to 1. If I would've did it Blender there would been artifacts and no smoothing. Substance would've have some small hiccups too but better than Blender.

[SuperMyckie]

How is it your are comparing 3 completely different software's???...

Substance is mainly for texturing
Blender, while generic is mainly for core 3D modelling and wrangling
Marmoset is good for lookdev rendering...

They are not of same playing field

[AnonGuardians]

Unfortunately it's not better than Substance Painter. I own both and Marmoset crashes alot. Also Marmoset has only seen 1 update in a year and thats not good.

[SnowInHD]

Not gonna lie. I had to stop watching your video. Great video up until you kept saying baking but with your accent you were saying bacon and I was getting really hungry. Great content thought!

[sylverdetective]

might?? it is lol blender texturing is trash lol. Everybody knows Mari is the king of texture applications though (: