Marmoset Toolbag for PBR preview is how many studios sign off a material before it hits Unreal or a render farm. Toolbag is not a modeling app. It is a lighting and texture viewer with a turntable, so mistakes in color space and normal convention show up in minutes. This guide covers a clean metalness-roughness setup and how to use Locker3d maps as a reference library.

Import the mesh and assign a material

Create a scene, import your FBX or OBJ with tangents if you baked them. Add a new material (metalness workflow). Assign albedo to Albedo, roughness to Roughness, metalness to Metalness, and the normal to Normal. Turn on the correct normal format: Toolbag lets you pick OpenGL or DirectX—match the bake. If you only want to judge a tile, import a plane or Toolbag’s built-in shader ball and load a set from the Locker3d catalog. CC0 means you can keep those files in a shared preview folder without a license spreadsheet.

Map slots and color space

Toolbag treats albedo as color. Roughness, metalness, and AO are scalar. If a roughness map looks too contrasty, you probably saved it with an sRGB profile; re-export linear PNG. Height can drive bump or displacement depending on the material type—start with bump for preview, displacement only if the mesh is dense. Do not put AO into albedo unless you are matching a baked engine path. Cavity can go in a multiply slot for extra dirt in crevices. For a refresher on what each map means, use the complete PBR guide and the beginner article.

  • Albedo: no lighting, sRGB
  • Roughness: linear, white = rough
  • Metalness: linear, white = metal
  • Normal: linear, match the green-channel convention
  • AO: linear, optional

Lighting that tells the truth

Use a studio HDRI and a second rim light. Spin the turntable. If the seam of a wood tile flashes every 90 degrees, the wrap is broken on one channel. If metal looks like gray plastic, metalness is not 1 or albedo is too bright. If concrete looks wet, roughness is too low or still in sRGB. Toolbag’s sky blur and exposure should stay modest; do not hide a bad map with bloom. Compare the same maps in Blender using the Blender setup if Toolbag and Cycles disagree—one of the two has a wrong flag.

Exporting previews versus exporting maps

Toolbag can render turntables and stills for art direction. That is not a substitute for exporting the texture set your engine needs. Keep source maps in the project; do not screenshot the viewport and call it albedo. If you bake in Toolbag, export 8-bit PNG for albedo and consider 16-bit for normals only if you see banding. Unity will still want smoothness; invert roughness outside Toolbag or in a convert step.

1K, 2K, 4K in a preview tool

Load 2K for daily library review. Load 4K when a lead will zoom on grout. Load 1K when you batch 50 materials. Locker3d is a free CC0 PBR library, so you can keep multiple resolutions on disk; see CC0 permissions. Toolbag will not make a 1K map look 4K—it will make a wrong 4K map obvious. More viewing and material articles are on the blog.

Frequently asked questions

Why use Marmoset Toolbag for PBR textures?

Toolbag is a fast, high-quality viewer for metalness-roughness materials. You can check seams, normal format, and lighting before you drop maps into a heavier DCC or engine.

Which maps does Marmoset Toolbag expect?

Albedo, roughness, metalness, and normal are the core. AO, cavity, and height are optional. Albedo is sRGB; the rest are linear. Watch the OpenGL versus DirectX normal toggle.

Should I preview 4K textures in Toolbag?

Yes for hero approval. Use 2K for daily look-dev and 1K for batch-checking a library. Toolbag is GPU-based, so a scene full of 4K sets will still run out of memory.