We’re excited to announce the release of Toolbag 4.05, a free update for all Toolbag 4 users! This release delivers several exciting updates to Toolbag’s 3D texturing and rendering systems.

New texture painting features include Symmetry, Lazy Mouse, and Stencils, bringing increased accuracy and efficiency to your texturing workflow. There’s been a complete overhaul to performance in texture projects as well (up to 10x faster!), and you’ll find additional refinements to adjustment layers and processors to provide a smoother user experience.

Upgrades to the rendering system include new post effect Toning controls, Temperature controls for light objects, an improved Refraction shader, and a new Glint shader for a convincing sparkle in the surfaces of car paint, water, and snow. Light Map baking has made its grand re-introduction to Toolbag 4. Lastly, don’t forget to try out the new USD file support for expanded interoperability throughout your 3D production pipeline.

Check out the 4.05 feature overview video above, and read on below for details of the latest additions and improvements available now in Toolbag 4.05.

Review the complete 4.05 changelog here.

Texturing & Painting

Up To 10x Faster!

Our continuous efforts to speed up texture project performance have come into full effect with the release of Toolbag 4.05, most notably while working in complex scenes. Texture projects containing large numbers of layers and masks have performed up to 10x faster, bringing a notable increase in overall app stability, and of course, your own productivity.

You’ll also notice improvements in memory management while texturing any high polygon meshes.

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Increase in Texturing Performance

Symmetry

One of our most highly requested painting features has arrived: Symmetry!

Paint perfectly symmetrical strokes along any axis with Mirror mode. Radial mode is great for quickly painting decorative detail, with adjustable instance counts for your painted detail.

Opt for a Custom Axis of symmetry, and use the advanced Align option to align the symmetrical plane to unique features of the mesh.

Lazy Mouse

Paint with exactitude using the Lazy Mouse slider, which smooths input from the mouse or tablet to make it easier to paint finer detail. Lazy Mouse can be used in combination with symmetry for maximum efficiency.

Stencils

Mask your painting tools with the new Stencil mode. Apply a Stencil Texture in your Tool Settings to define a screen space mask for painting in your viewport. This feature is great for quickly laying down logos, graffiti, grime, and other patterned detail. Manipulate your stencils on the fly using:

  • Z to toggle stencils on/off

  • Z + LMB: rotate stencil (hold Shift to snap)

  • Z + MMB: pan stencil

  • Z + RMB: zoom stencil

Note: Look to the new Stencils folder in Toolbag’s Library to get started with dozens of free stencil textures.

OffOn

3D model by Eugene Lukashevich

Seamless 3D Blur

We’ve updated the Blur adjustment layer in texture projects to work seamlessly in 3D space, and use an advanced technique to blend one UV island to another to  determine the correct blur result over seams. Note your blur radius set automatically scales in connection with changes to your Project Resolution to maintain the accurate levels of perceptive blur.

Rendering Updates

Highlights, Midtones, Shadows, Clarity

Leverage the power of these new post-effect settings to enhance your final render’s image quality. Look to your camera object’s Tone Mapping settings to adjust Highlights, Midtones, and Shadows, along with a Clarity slider to allow adjustment over the local contrast in your midtones.

Glint Shader

The new Glint shader, found under the Refraction shading module allows you to layer in a sparkle effect, useful for creating convincing car paint, or the glistening effect on the surface of turbulent water or snow. Achieve finer control over the glint effect by adding a Glint Map and adjusting the intensity, density, roughness, and scale.

Lighting Render Passes

We’ve added several direct, indirect, and complete Lighting Render Passes, including ray-traced Ambient Occlusion, to allow you to composite lighting passes over your renders in post-processing pipelines.

The new lighting Render Passes are also available as viewport rendering modes, selected via the render mode dropdown in each viewport.

Ray Traced AO for Raster Rendering

We’ve added Ray Traced Ambient Occlusion as a second option when working in Raster rendering. This produces a more accurate result when compared to the original Screen AO. Note that performance can be slower when running on a GPU that does not support hardware acceleration of ray-traced rendering features.

Ray Traced AO (Raster)Screen AO (Raster)

Light Temperature

Switch up your light color temperature using the new Temperature option in the Light object. Set your desired Kelvin value, or choose between a number of existing temperature presets like Candle, Incandescent, Direct Sun, and more.

Improved Refraction

We’ve revamped the refraction shading model to make it simpler to use, yet more powerful. The updated Refraction module has:

  • consolidated light absorption and density into a new Depth slider

  • new Depth Map and Scatter Map texture inputs

  • new Roughness Bias slider to modulate the roughness of refraction in relation to reflected light

NVIDIA DLSS Image Upscaling

We’ve added support for NVIDIA’s DLSS, which renders the viewport at a reduced resolution and uses sophisticated AI-based technology to upscale the image, improving performance while minimizing reductions in image quality. This works especially well with High-DPI displays.

Note: DLSS requires a Windows PC with a compatible NVIDIA RTX GPU.

Baking

Light Maps

Light map baking has returned to Toolbag! With support for Complete, Diffuse, Specular, and Indirect bake map types.

Scene

New Export Window + USD File Support

We’ve revamped Toolbag’s export window to give you more file format-specific export options for Marmoset Viewer, FBX, OBJ, Collada, gITF, and now USD!

Import/Export of USD (Universal Scene Description) files enables non-destructive editing of scene data and modern support for material and lighting information. We’ve extended the USD format to save Toolbag-specific scene and material information, which allows you to retain most scene parameters when exporting to USD and re-importing to other Toolbag scenes.

USD also brings more seamless interoperability between Toolbag and other 3D DCC software, such as NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform.

Note: Toolbag’s USD file format is being continually expanded for better interoperability. We encourage you to share your feedback and requests at: support@marmoset.co.

Get Started with 4.05!

To quickly receive the 4.05 update, check for an auto-update prompt in-app! If you’re brand new to Toolbag 4, follow the button below to download the latest full installer and begin a free, full-featured 30-day trial.