AutoMAT makes Marmoset Toolbag materials for you
Check out AutoMAT, a neat €3 plugin created by 3D artist Luciano Laudani that (partially) automates the process of building materials inside Toolbag, Marmoset’s popular look dev and real-time rendering toolset.
According to Laudani, the add-on is “designed to work even with the messiest scenes”, figuring out which texture map goes where, and assembling them into game-engine-ready PBR materials.
Batch process folders of texture maps into PBR materials inside Toolbag
AutoMAT actually came out earlier this summer, but we only spotted it this week when Marmoset added it to its official library of Toolbag add-ons.
The plugin speeds up the process of setting up 3D assets for preview, taking folders of texture maps and batch processing them into materials inside Toolbag.
Users simply select a texture folder and one of six preset material types: native metallic/roughness and specular/glossiness PBR materials, or those of game engines Unity, UE4 and CryEngine/Lumberyard.
AutoMAT then searches the filenames in the texture folder for text strings like ‘basecolor’ and ‘normal’ and uses them to assign maps to shaders for each sub-mesh in the scene.
You can choose how the plugin resolves multiple matching textures; and each material channel can be viewed individually to check that the correct map has been applied.
If no matching map is found, AutoMAT displays a checkermap texture on the model.
Although it isn’t a magic bullet – it won’t handle typos, for example – Laudani says that “as long as there is some kind of pattern in your texture names, there’s probably a way to make them work”.
The plugin also comes with a number of other useful settings, including the option to switch all of the normal maps in a scene from DirectX to OpenGL format.
Pricing and system requirements
AutoMat is available for Toolbag 3.08, although Laudani says that it should also work with previous versions of the software. It costs €3 (around $3.50).