Foundry's Mari - 3D texture painting

[leslie.button]

http://www.fxguide.com/article604.html


Mari is a new product for the Foundry, developed by their R&D department and the texture department at Weta Digital. Mari has been forged by Weta in the heat of the production of films such as Lord of The Rings, King Kong and Avatar. Mari is a full 3D paint/texture tool able to handle up to 30K textures and produce production ready assets while remaining responsive and interactive. The product is not a modeling tool such as Mudbox - rather it is focused just on texture painting. The application allows hundreds of production textures to be painted on a model, but rather than be limited to just a static neutral pose, you can import an animation sequence and still interactively work on the texturing. This is important as seams and stretching can often only appear when the character or asset is in motion in a real scene, which is exactly why Mari has this feature - it is a direct result of Production requests from the original Weta team.
One of the programs strongest features is its interactivity. Even with real world production models of high complexity, with multiple 2K textures - the program is lightning fast and responsive. Through the use of some GUI and some very smart CPU programing, the engineering team has produced an extraordinarily interactive program.





To aid in workflow - multiple models can be imported and either models or parts of a master model can be hidden, allowing painting behind the asset and into tight joints and textural creases.

Mari:
* interactively handles very large 3D model data sets, scaling to over 1 million polygons
* supports large textures, up to 32K x 32K pixels (normally, single textures never need to be this large)
* handles hundreds and thousands of textures per model, over many layers
* provides single- or multi- patch UV texture map management
* supports multiple models or model instances in a single scene
* handles animated geometry and animated textures - floating point, 16-bit or 8-bit textures

In all, this means Mari is happy managing over 100 gigabyte geometry and texture data sets on a single model without slowing down artist interaction and workflow. High performance is achieved with modest hardware requirements (2-4 gigabyte system memory, .5-1 gigabyte graphics memory), with Mari automatically making efficient use of available resources and background task processes.

Mari has a painting toolset that includes:
* a clean and intuitive GUI
* fully customizable brush engine
* paint through and clone brush (between layers and textures)
* smear/drag brush
* paint canvas transform, grid warp and free-form ‘pin’ warp
* blur and sharpen
* advanced ‘healing’ brush for seamless removal and duplication of texture detail
* overall grading and high end filtering

Mari does not at the time of publication have a Per-Face Texture Mapping (Ptex) implementation, (see last week's fxpodcast discussion with Disney re: Ptex) but it is on the roadmap for immediate consideration. The challenge for the Foundry will be in selling a paint only program rather than a paint and texturing program that also does 3D sculpting - such as ZBrush or Mudbox. Interestingly, Autodesk Mudbox was created by Skymatter, founded by former artists also from Weta, where it was first used, also on King Kong. The Foundry's approach to Mari is to aim it at bigger studios where LookDev and Modeling are two quite separate areas, so the lack of sculpting tools in a paint program would not be such a big issue. But further down the track it is possible that the Foundry will need to address this if they aim to expand to the broader, smaller facility market, which may be less keen to deploy both a Zbrush/Mudbox and Mari parallel setup. While Mari will not be extremely expensive (see below), users in smaller facilities familiar with say ZBrush may not even want to learn a second or third application.

In terms of training and GUI acceptance, Mari is very fast to pick up. Its GUI could perhaps do with a fraction more photoshop-style GUI elements to appeal to the widest audience, but it is very accessible and hundreds of Weta staff have been trained on the product inside Weta and even non-technical artists have been able to be production productive in a matter of days.

This was rather unexpected, but entirely awesome news! Would love to hear from you weta guys if it really is the bee's knees. :) I've not yet played with Mudbox 2011's new texture tools, but this tool sounds much more oriented at large studios pushing tons of seperate textures. Every texture department I've worked with has been very disappointed by the current crop of 3d texture painting, so I wonder if this is the tool they've been waiting for. Forged by the Weta texture department, I'm willing to bet that yes it is :)

[leslie.button]

http://thefoundry.s3.amazonaws.com/downloads/CaseStudy_Mari_Avatar.pdf

Lookin very cool, definitely oriented at big pipelines, and looks like Linux support only now

1100

:drool:

[BrettSinclair]

This looks really promising. I wonder what texture projection functions it has.

[Ken]

wow..... can't say anything... really cooooool !!!

[tonytrout]

Damn.....its got lattice distortion tools for fitting projected textures, something I have been asking in mudbox for years now.

[El Burritoh]

It's about time those Weta types shared their texturing toys with us! clap

[pitiwazou]

Very good !!

[PascalR]

That's great, I haven't played much with it at work, but I saw some demos and yes it is a really nice tool.
I think it comes with the banshee model for you to paint over and play with (nah just joking)

[PaulAdams]

Curious about this. Is there an estimated release date?

[El Burritoh]

And did I read correctly that it's currently Linux-only? If so, is there a preferred version of Linux for running it?

This should fill a hole in my workflow. I've been looking at a good painting solution and I'd pay 500e in a heartbeat for this. I wonder how its painting performance contrasts with Mudbox's?

Say, you Weta guys need to get some people from your texturing and rendering departments on this forum. :D

[bneall]

From what I understand, I'm going to be using this at my next gig... very curious to see how it does.

[rasmusW]

wauw! this sounds so great...
i really hope that when it has proven it's very promising worth as the best texture app, it will get out on other platforms:D

you are one lucky dude, ben.

-r

[Intervain]

That's great, I haven't played much with it at work, but I saw some demos and yes it is a really nice tool.
I think it comes with the banshee model for you to paint over and play with (nah just joking)
Now let's get the weta fur system out on the market :D

well that'd be nice *nudge*

but yeah I'm really excited about this one. shame on the linux only thing :(

[phrenzy84]

Im pretty sure i heard there was gonna be a windows build.

[jack_sparow]

The GUI is in QT so it's multiplateform based, it's not hard to have all os supported build so.

It will be cool pascal to have the weta 's fur tool. ;)

I will love to play with.

[El Burritoh]

Just out of curiosity, anyone know whether Weta uses a fully custom Linux distro or one of the more common variants out there instead? I've just discovered Mint myself and like it muy mucho.

Here's another screenshot from the Linux build:
http://img169.imageshack.us/img169/3079/goggles.png

[Manuel Poehlau]

This looks very promising, can´t wait for the release!

[Mars]

This looks really promising. I wonder what texture projection functions it has.
We can project 16K images! :bouncy:

[BrettSinclair]

Come on Pascal. Pull some strings. I'd love too see the hair/fur system at weta ;). King Kong still blows my mind. I'm also pretty sure I saw an Anne test awhile back. Needless too say it disappeared :(. All I remember is her walking on a field in daylight.

@Mars- 16k Projection! Freakin hell. Thats what i'm talking about. I may need too get me some linux. Hehe.

[PascalR]

Hehe, you know I'd love too share more info with you guys but I am afraid this wouldn't be the wisest thing to do for me and this website ;)
There will be more cool info and video online soon regarding Mari.

Cheers

P.

[pitiwazou]

There will be more cool info and video online soon regarding Mari.
Very Good ^^

[El Burritoh]

Oh, we understand, Pascal!

:D

[El Burritoh]

This lengthy video was just released:
http://www.fxguide.com/fxguidetv.html

So I just have to ask, to get the most out of Mari, one really does need to implement a UV Tile workflow, right? I mean it's great that I can create a single texture at 32k on a single UV tile, but for ultra high-res textures made up of hundreds of images, I assume I'd need a workflow with something like Maya on the other side, which would let me assemble all those textures with proper UV remapping? Perhaps Mari exports a Maya file with the basic shader already built? How do you handle 500 2k textures in Hypershade?

[Flo]

How do you handle 500 2k textures in Hypershade?


higher texture res vs amount of maps is highly dependent on your workflow. if you decide to use multiple texture tiles you got several options in maya from the ayered texture node to simple blend node setups. Each texture transform in maya let`s you translate the map outside 0-1 space so you can easily render multiple tiles within maya.

[oglu]

How do you handle 500 2k textures in Hypershade?


there are scripts for... its based on the mudbox naming convention but maybe mari is using the same or you could mod the mel...

http://www.pixelcg.com/blog/?p=88

[Intervain]

yeah the animation and the polycount made me want it now!!!

[El Burritoh]

Just started my run with the beta tonight. Looks like I can't discuss anything according to the License Agreement from the Foundry, which kinda sucks because I had some workflow questions. I'll figure it out the hard (fun) way.

Running it on Kubuntu 10.04 with a GTX 470 and so far it's rockin'

[MikeANash]

El Burritoh - How did you go about getting on the beta team? Any chance you can hook a brother up :rofl:

[El Burritoh]

El Burritoh - How did you go about getting on the beta team? Any chance you can hook a brother up :rofl:


All we did was register for email notification a few months ago when the Foundry announced the beta. A while later I got a stock email saying registrations were open. Filled it out, went along my way. Then over the last couple of days I heard from them and got set up for it.

The public registration page (http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=I5fXxqyh84T8ldmY9EZQwptX2jv85%2bjaN26y4v oxq%2fQ%3d&) on their site is still up. I would sign up and see what happens. Beyond that, there's nothing I can really do. I'm as far down the chain as anyone can be, I'm afraid.

I can't wait to see this thing hit the market. I've only been using a few hours, but I feel like I've just jumped 5 years into the future.

[oglu]

here the mari char for download with textures...
http://beta.thefoundry.co.uk/products/mari/demo-assets/

[El Burritoh]

The Foundry was unsure how to best distribute those texture files. The Blacksmith body alone has 2.5GB of textures. Straight up download, I guess!


I've been working on a Python script for XSI to manage the shader tree setup for multi-patch textures. It's a work in progress but so far so good. I ran the Blacksmith's textures through it and they all hooked up perfectly. Mental Ray renders it all without a problem.

And I've got a script for modo to automatically fit and lay out my UV islands into separate patches, going 10 columns out before incrementing the row. Streamlining as much as I can. Fun stuff, and gets me into Python.

[PaulAdams]

Some new videos... looks amazing and very accessible!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8ADAKWjdQw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUfNLCMnWz4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4E7o4B382w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJfc_BlMwyU

[MikeANash]

They just need to add some sculpting tools then zbrush can go to hell where it belongs :)

[jack_sparow]

Yeah Mari is a really nice painting tool for production stuff, it just need Ptex format and tools available to be a lot more efficient.

the other thing is you need a good and recent computer to work with and project paint fast, but it's a pretty smart tool.

[collings]

it looks great but one issue for me is that it's not compatible with photoshop. You can't just save your texture in psd and go back and forth between PS and Mari while keeping your psd layers organized the same way :(.

This being said, Mari maybe have all the texturing tools needed and so we won't have the necessity to switch in photoshop for further editing along the process. :)

I can't wait to try it on a real production to see how i can make it fits in my workflow.

[adamlewis]

They just need to add some sculpting tools then zbrush can go to hell where it belongs :)

Mike have you used the latest Mudbox much? I absolutely love texture painting in it, and obviously the sculpting is about as good as it gets. While it's certainly not as powerful as Mari painting wise, what it lacks in features it makes up for in ease of use. I love being able to instantly switch between painting and sculpting as needed, this is especially great if while texture painting I notice some flaw in the sculpt, I can just fix it up on the fly and quickly bake out new displacement maps. Such a pleasure to work in.

[MikeANash]

Hey Adam,

I started off using mudbox before zbrush, always loved it.

I'm probably going to start sculpting models in mudbox and then move onto Z-brush for fine details. I find it really hard to model realistic models in Z-brush with its lighting and material setup.

[Infinite]

it looks great but one issue for me is that it's not compatible with photoshop. You can't just save your texture in psd and go back and forth between PS and Mari while keeping your psd layers organized the same way :(

Oh that's a damn shame! I didn't know that :mad:

Bad move really.. I hope that changes in the future.

[jack_sparow]

yeah but you are not suppose to use much of photoshop if you are using mari, that's the man goal of it. you can do many photoshop stuff in mari and directly in 3d or Uv view. understand mari is a paint 3D tool and not a Photoshop 3D.

[Infinite]

yeah but you are not suppose to use much of photoshop if you are using mari, that's the man goal of it. you can do many photoshop stuff in mari and directly in 3d or Uv view. understand mari is a paint 3D tool and not a Photoshop 3D.

Really? I would never have thought. :)

Being compatible with Photoshop would make pretty good sense for most studios and most pipelines. Even if it's just for colour, bump and specular output. The same would count for Mudbox and ZBrush just like Bodypaint.

Just in case you might need some features in another Application that aren't yet supported in Mari, certain plug-in effects or brush tools etc etc

plus you may just want to do some 2D tweaks. But I guess if Ptex is supported and some projects have massive UV tiles , PS would be no good anyway.

Being able to read and write PSD files might have been a good idea though, no?

[El Burritoh]

I wouldn't say it's incompatible with Photoshop. It's a tall order to make a program that brings in a fully layered PSD intact. Plus, Mari is designed to work with the equivalent of dozens of image files, so imagine Photoshop being able to paint across multiple PSDs at once...

[Infinite]

I wouldn't say it's incompatible with Photoshop. It's a tall order to make a program that brings in a fully layered PSD intact. Plus, Mari is designed to work with the equivalent of dozens of image files, so imagine Photoshop being able to paint across multiple PSDs at once...

Of course what I meant was... not the idea of painting across multiple PSD's in Photoshop just the ability to load and save and to work directly with that format in Mari... :D and if you need to tweak or do something in 2D Open and modify in Photoshop..

If you can do that now, great. If not.... Oh!

Does Mari have it's own file format that stores layers? per image?

[El Burritoh]

It doesn't store data for patches in files until you export the channel(s). It's all in a big cache file as far as I know.

There is a PS-friendly projection mode which lets you grab a section and send it to PS, somewhat like ZB's ZAppLink, though different in a few respects as well. How large a section you can send to PS depends on your hardware I think, since it grabs what's in the paintbuffer (I think). There is definitely interaction between PS and Mari however. You might download the docs from the Foundry's site and check it out for yourself. I can't remember all the ins and outs of Mari's "Projectors" at the moment.

[spaz8]

PSD support is a big deal if the games industry is going to embrace Mari. I really want to leave bodypaint behind, I haven't noticed any more than token improvements in BP for several (4?) years. Hence, you have Mari. BP needs better navigation like Mari, the ability to hide geometry, more image manipulation, handle denser meshes.. just the ability to flip a source image 180 degrees. Ability to paint in tangent space, or mirrored mode without mirrored uv's.

Sadly what BP does have going for it is very extensive PSD support. Its not perfect, but awfully close. Hopefully Mudbox 2012 keeps maturing its paint texturing set, I really enjoyed painting textures by hand in it, over BP. I do choose BP over Mudbox 2011.5 for painting photo textures.

It seems like full PSD support for Mari should be really high on the to-do list since most of the world uses photoshop to texture. The idea of you not needing Photoshop when you have Mari is a nice idea, but not a practical one. In practice I still need PS to use with Bodypaint or, Mudbox paint, nothing comes out of 3d paint perfect and without the need for some cleanup and refinement.And who wants to fire up a 3d paint app to make a simple edit.

[El Burritoh]

Hi there, Ken! Welcome to the party! :beerchug:

As I understand it, Mari has been developed as a tool for texturing high-res assets for film using a multi-patch approach. Since that's been their priority, and since Photoshop can't exactly handle "multiple patches" in a single file that makes any kind of sense, I can see how PSD support would be a later feature. Personally I agree that PSD support is needed for at least a single-patch workflow. Hopefully they'll implement that. I'm sure they're trying to get Mari used wherever possible, but I don't think the games industry is their primary target. I'd love to see PSD support rolled into a new layering method and released in the same version.

[phrenzy84]

I think mudbox will grow in texture features that will open it up more for artists. Right now its features/workflow is already sweet but for hardcore texture painters i dont know if its upto par with Body Paint. If Mari can offer better integration with PSD i think BP might go the way of the dodo which is sad but inevitable.


But i really think its mudbox that will benefit the most because it already has such decent features and if zbrush was just able to paint in UV space it would fair much better in terms of versatility.

[oglu]

In the first PSD support is looking interesting but in some cases it could limt mari or mud. If you are going into multi files like mari is doing everything is possible like masking a mask. And ptex is alo coming i see no future for psd files...

[phrenzy84]

And ptex is alo coming i see no future for psd files...

Agreed. And would i be right in saying that there is no 2d solution for working with ptex files..... and since mari can paint in UV layout mode,it has the upper hand in this regard. But does it have enough in terms of pseudo 2d tools like PS in uv mode?

[forelle]

Hello,

Thanks for all of the interest in Mari. Layers and PSD support is, and continues to be, an important subject for us. We have initial PSD support penciled in for the next release (1.3) and a full Photoshop style layer stack per channel for 2.0 later in the year.

Although the current channels / shaders system is different to a traditional PS layer stack, it is in some important ways, much more powerful and flexible. Shaders allow seamless and easy reuse of masks across shader inputs (i.e. paint a vein mask and then reuse it automatically in your diffuse, bump, spec, subsurface etc.)

Beyond a certain level of shader complexity, people start using PS like a compositing system, all be it one with manual intervention when sharing masks.

But, all of that said, we know that people are comfortable with traditional layers and have been working for the last few releases to implement them.

Unfortunately we have a big requirement to keep Mari scalable.

A quick thought experiment about the problem we're trying to solve is having 200 2k PSDs open with 50 layers each, doing a channel opacity change on all of them at the same time at 30fps. We're getting there, but it does require some interesting engineering.

If people have any other Mari questions, please shout out.

Jack Greasley
Mari Product Manager.

[oglu]

thanks for info forelle... allways great to have an insider here... :D
how is the ptex support goin..?

[forelle]

thanks for info forelle... allways great to have an insider here... :D
how is the ptex support goin..?

Good. It is on track for 1.3. We're taking the proof of concept version we've had for a while and making it a full workflow.

We're at the stage where we can open all of the examples from the ptex.us website (and lots of others too), paint on them and generally muck about.

Next up is saving and face resizing.

J

[oglu]

1.3 is here...
http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/articles/2011/05/31/243/mari-13-is-now-available/

[forelle]

1.3 is here...
http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/articles/2011/05/31/243/mari-13-is-now-available/

If you guys have any questions about 1.3 please let me know.

Onwards to 2.0

[spaz8]

I am curious about ATI support. The studio I recently left, and the studio I am at now both seem to be phasing out Nvidia (quadro) cards for ATI's (radeon).

On a similar note I'd love an OSX version for myself, and it looks like a similar ATI landscape there too.

I wanted to test drive 1.3 at work (PC) and then realized the Nvidia issue. It is an adoption barrier certainly in my neck of the woods.

[forelle]

I am curious about ATI support. The studio I recently left, and the studio I am at now both seem to be phasing out Nvidia (quadro) cards for ATI's (radeon).

On a similar note I'd love an OSX version for myself, and it looks like a similar ATI landscape there too.

I wanted to test drive 1.3 at work (PC) and then realized the Nvidia issue. It is an adoption barrier certainly in my neck of the woods.

ATI is something we're still actively looking at. In VFX we very little penetration from ATI, with NVidia seemingly ruling the roost. This is really the main reason we haven't got round to ATI support yet.

Are you at Bioware at the moment? I'd be interested to know the usage of ATI in games. I take it you guys run on windows?

J

[bneall]

Bit of feedback for you.

First of all, I love Mari. Currently I'm using Mari at work 100% for texturing (all Linux), which is my primary profession. I'm weening off of Photoshop, and Mari definitely shows how PS can be very inefficient in most pipelines. I plan on continuing to use Mari as my go-to texture app.

On Hardware:
As I mentioned in the Mari forum, I feel like the recommended hardware could be slightly better supported/documented. As it is, its a bit behind and vague. Obviously the ATI thing doubles whatever bottleneck The Foundry has with testing hardware. The biggest gap I think is between the consumer cards 480 and 580. There are many models between these two supported cards.

On Layers:
First of all I do love the channel system. It may be foreign to people not working in more structured productions, but I was basically mimicking this work flow in Photoshop before I even got Mari, so to have this as a baseline is quite awesome. I think some sort of layers per channel system will give Mari even more power (in a non-destructive workflow way), but I don't think I will ever use PSDs between the programs.

On Displacement Preview
Pretty cool so far, it would be interesting to know more about what its doing. From what I can tell, it doesn't always tessellate the geo, but uses a normal map sort effect? I assume this because the profile of the geo I'm assigning displacement to does not change. Though It will if I put some high value high frequency map on it, so I'm really not sure what its doing.


--------------------------


Feature Requests:
(please correct me if these do exist)

Bezier Line tool:
Brush stroke and fill options.

Shape tool:
Circle, polygon, and line modes.

RGB Matte Shader:
Screen R,G, and B on each other using three unique masks.
(pre 1.3 I had to make dummy RGB channels and create diffuse screen blends, ideally this could be consolidated into 1 or 3 nodes only referencing the mask channels. The new constant color mask works ok but still need to define a base "black" channel, and also cannot do a screen operation)

Masked Environment Sphere:
For painting reflection maps/masks.

Gradient Tool:
Hide when painting option.

Brush History:
Just got used to tools using same brush, now they all have their own history, really awkward change! Ability to toggle this functionality would be great.

Color Curves:
Link channel option (Mirror edits between 2-3 channels).

Bake to export:
Some sort of operation to bake directly to disk. I use composites for my main maps, as you would expect. To export them I need to bake from a shader, which creates a new channel, which I have to manually export then delete, all while filling up large amounts of undo memory (20+ tiles, ouch). Ideally would be great to just bake directly to disk some way and bypass making a new channel.

Shadow preview:
Shadows in OpenGL (would be fine if shadows not allowed during painting if need be).

Turntable generation:
ala Mudbox turntable.

Ambient occlusion:
Multiple object AO baking (rays detect multiple unique imported objects, not just self)

[Intervain]

nice writeup :thumbsup: - I want to finally try it once I update my videocard because alas it crashes all the time otherwise :(

[El Burritoh]

Good stuff, Ben! I'm jealous that you get to paint all day long...

I think my only real qualms with Mari pertain to its performance under Windows. There are some known (but perhaps not perfectly identified?) hiccups in Mari's performance when run on Windows. And sadly, they're in-your-face kinds of problems. Notably the hang-ups prior to projection. I know this has been a tricky one to figure out, Jack! It hasn't put us off using Mari, but it does make things bittersweet for Windows users.

[forelle]

Thanks for the great feedback. Glad you like it.

Hardware:
We're looking to improve our HW support, and try to test Mari on as many cards as possible. As you pointed our there are a LOT of different variants and flavors of cards, especially in the GeForce range.

Quadros are pretty easy, as there is only one Quadro 4000 for example, but GeForces are a problem. We only have limited QA resources and can only test so many cards on each iteration. But we will keep trying to improve this.

Layers:
The existing channels and shaders system was designed with production workflows in mind, but we have a struggle convincing people that they can be quicker without PS. Without 2.0 we're trying to incorporate layers in a way that doesn't change the existing model too much.

We think that the main change in channel / shader land is that each module will be able to work with any component. I.e. Masked Diffuse Blend, will become Masked Blend, and you can choose from Diffuse, Spec, Bump etc.

Each channel will then have layers, layer groups, adjustment layers and masks.

Displacement:
Mari dices the geometry automatically based on the camera position and the texture size. It should displace the silhouette too, and it you're seeing cases where it isn't please let us know. It really is making a lot of triangles.
Brush Tip Behavior:
This is going to become a preference. Some people want it to remember, others complained that it did. Probably a 2.0 feature.

Turntable:
If you create a projector, you can right click on it an render out turnables and diagnostic (multi-channel) turntables.

Masked Env Sphere:
Trying to get this into 1.3v2 along with a Fresnel term.

Other Requests:
All really good stuff. Keep it coming. I've forwarded this onto QA to track and open requests for these.

Thank you.




Bit of feedback for you.

First of all, I love Mari. Currently I'm using Mari at work 100% for texturing (all Linux), which is my primary profession. I'm weening off of Photoshop, and Mari definitely shows how PS can be very inefficient in most pipelines. I plan on continuing to use Mari as my go-to texture app.

On Hardware:
As I mentioned in the Mari forum, I feel like the recommended hardware could be slightly better supported/documented. As it is, its a bit behind and vague. Obviously the ATI thing doubles whatever bottleneck The Foundry has with testing hardware. The biggest gap I think is between the consumer cards 480 and 580. There are many models between these two supported cards.

On Layers:
First of all I do love the channel system. It may be foreign to people not working in more structured productions, but I was basically mimicking this work flow in Photoshop before I even got Mari, so to have this as a baseline is quite awesome. I think some sort of layers per channel system will give Mari even more power (in a non-destructive workflow way), but I don't think I will ever use PSDs between the programs.

On Displacement Preview:
Pretty cool so far, it would be interesting to know more about what its doing. From what I can tell, it doesn't always tessellate the geo, but uses a normal map sort effect? I assume this because the profile of the geo I'm assigning displacement to does not change. Though It will if I put some high value high frequency map on it, so I'm really not sure what its doing.


--------------------------


Feature Requests:
(please correct me if these do exist)

Bezier Line tool:
Brush stroke and fill options.

Shape tool:
Circle, polygon, and line modes.

RGB Matte Shader:
Screen R,G, and B on each other using three unique masks.
(pre 1.3 I had to make dummy RGB channels and create diffuse screen blends, ideally this could be consolidated into 1 or 3 nodes only referencing the mask channels. The new constant color mask works ok but still need to define a base "black" channel, and also cannot do a screen operation)

Masked Environment Sphere:
For painting reflection maps/masks.

Gradient Tool:
Hide when painting option.

Brush History:
Just got used to tools using same brush, now they all have their own history, really awkward change! Ability to toggle this functionality would be great.

Color Curves:
Link channel option (Mirror edits between 2-3 channels).

Bake to export:
Some sort of operation to bake directly to disk. I use composites for my main maps, as you would expect. To export them I need to bake from a shader, which creates a new channel, which I have to manually export then delete, all while filling up large amounts of undo memory (20+ tiles, ouch). Ideally would be great to just bake directly to disk some way and bypass making a new channel.

Shadow preview:
Shadows in OpenGL (would be fine if shadows not allowed during painting if need be).

Turntable generation:
ala Mudbox turntable.

Ambient occlusion:
Multiple object AO baking (rays detect multiple unique imported objects, not just self)

[bneall]

burritoh: Yea, Mari is great excuse to ditch Windows. Photoshop is a crutch! haha.

Jack: Thanks for listening, look forward to all the new versions coming out.

[forelle]

Hi,

We've just uploaded some Mari 1.3 feature introduction videos to our YouTube channel.

Have a look if you're interested in the new stuff in the latest release.

General 1.3 Intro
Displacement Preview
PTex
Snapshots
Tiled Textures
Environment mapping

As always, please fire away with any questions.

[companioncube]

thank you for the new vids

[El Burritoh]

1.3v2 is out now with some cool improvements. Perhaps the best improvement for Windows users is the resolution of that annoying baking delay bug. "Watching the paint dry" goes quite swiftly now, linux-style.

[companioncube]

some news about Mari 1.4 from FXguide

"PSD support: Mari 1.4 will allow you to load layered PSD documents, make modifications, and save back out
Adding a C API to allow 3rd party coding for image formats, model formats and more OpenColorIO support
Planning to add ATI support for Radeon and Fire GL cards (subject to change)
Triplanar projection support in real time on the GPU
Refine and improve camera controls

Greasley also gave some thoughts as to where Mari might possibly go moving forward. They are definitely exploring the idea of turning Mari into a more general high end, layered, image editing and painting program that is targeted towards the vfx and cgi pipeline. He specifically talked about Mari being a program that could paint not just on 3D models, but also on a 2D canvas in HDR. Could be interesting…"

[companioncube]

there was a live presentation by nvidia presented by Miguel Ortega from siggraph about DDs work on thor using mari and mudbox but they couldn't show the screen because of copyright issues, was still intersting listening to his talk.

[companioncube]

Mari, VRay (maya), HDRI PTex Lighting Tutorials

"This workflow shows how to easily get super realistic refelctions, refraction and lighting in VRay using HDRI environments projected and painted in Mari"

Pt1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1d8ypguQjFw
Pt2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdEyQGzRSaQ
Pt3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3nPBrESJeE

[oglu]

thanks for those great tutorials...


could you post them also in the tutorial section...
otherwise they could get lost...

[Infinite]

some news about Mari 1.4 from FXguide

"PSD support: Mari 1.4 will allow you to load layered PSD documents, make modifications, and save back out
Adding a C API to allow 3rd party coding for image formats, model formats and more OpenColorIO support
Planning to add ATI support for Radeon and Fire GL cards (subject to change)
Triplanar projection support in real time on the GPU
Refine and improve camera controls

Greasley also gave some thoughts as to where Mari might possibly go moving forward. They are definitely exploring the idea of turning Mari into a more general high end, layered, image editing and painting program that is targeted towards the vfx and cgi pipeline. He specifically talked about Mari being a program that could paint not just on 3D models, but also on a 2D canvas in HDR. Could be interesting…"

Very cool indeed.

Also fantastic tutorials, really shows off the power of Mari!

[kissb]

I have a question about the displacement preview, any help is appreciated :)

I have an old quadro fx5800 in my machine, and it only supports DX9. I'd like to know if the displacement preview has anything to do with DX11 tessalation, or is it going to work on this card?

BTW, it would awesome to have an alternative to photoshop!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[oglu]

think thats the DX11 tesselation yes...

as you can see here...
* The displacement preview feature in MARI is currently only supported by these cards
http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/mari/system-requirements/

[AlexTamayo]

Any chance that The Foundry would expand the supported cards for Mari. I unfortunately have a nVidia FX 1800 right now. I really hoping to change it soon, but right now, I can't run Mari properly.

I downloaded the trial to see if I could buy it but it gave me the "your card is not supported error" very often :( I'm really hoping to buy a new one, but on the mean time, is there any plan to expand the support?

Cheers,


Alex

[forelle]

http://img828.imageshack.us/img828/594/maristrap.jpg (http://thefoundry.co.uk/mari/)
Three Musketeers: © Summit Entertainment & Constantin Films. Images courtesy of Mr. X.

After months of coding and coffee, we've just shipped the latest version of Mari, 1.4.

Mari 1.4 has got lots of very cool stuff in it but the highlights are


PSD workflows for textures and projections
Industry leading colour managment via OpenColorIO
Live Triplanar projections for flexible seamless coverage
Zoom tool
Realtime colour correction modules
Masked filtering for exact control
C API for data import / export
Hundreds of improvements and optimizations


We've made a cool video showing off the new features (http://player.vimeo.com/video/32911259?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&color=fbca54)

The full release notes can be found here (http://thefoundry.s3.amazonaws.com/products/mari/releases/1.4v1/Mari_1.4v1_ReleaseNotes.pdf)

And you can download a 15 day free trial of Mari 1.4 (http://thefoundry.co.uk/mari)

Thanks to Jeremy Selan and the team at Sony Pictures Imageworks for releasing and supporting OpenColorIO.

Also thanks to the alpha and beta teams for their great feedback.

As always feedback questions are very much welcome, so fire away.

[companioncube]

awesome updates