Marmoset Toolbag 4.05 is now available in a public beta. Despite being a .05 release for this games-focused desktop software, it’s being touted as a big update which greatly improves texture painting and the available range of materials and lights. There’s also a new stabiliser for your hand-painted brush strokes. Apparently also a “10x” speed boost, on big complex multi-layered object-painting projects.
Interestingly there is also a mention of the NVIDIA “DLSS viewport upscaling”, the first I’ve heard of such a thing in 3D production software. Intended for (retro/older?) videogames, it can up-scale “by 4x”. In Marmoset Toolbag it’s said to enable real-time up-scaling of your viewport. (Adobe also has something called “neural rendering”, which seems to evolve an AI render from a 3D point-cloud, but that’s still at the research-paper stage).
Sadly Marmoset Toolbag is now “Windows 10 only”, but it’s good to see there is still a one-time purchase at $320 for hobbyists. I admit I’m not very familiar with this side of the 3D software world, but I know that Substance Painter (or the free Material Maker) and 3DCoat are some of the ‘adjacent’ software packages for desktop. I’m uncertain how Marmoset and 3DCoat line up these days, feature-wise, and if they can perhaps be classed as broadly having feature-parity. Maybe a reader of this blog could advise on that?