The Foundry Announces MARI 3 Features

The Foundry has announced it is to showcase MARI 3, the latest version of its 3D paint package, at Siggraph 2015.

MARI 3 is ideal for texturing and look development artists in the VFX, animation and games industries, and combines productivity enhancing features with broader and tighter pipeline integration. This includes an exposed node graph for advanced users and integration with the rendering and baking capabilities of MODO, The Foundry's 3D content creation solution.

"Fitting into the pipeline or creative lifecycle in which an artist works is just as important as enabling artists to create beautiful 3D painted and textured content," said Jack Greasley, head of new technologies at The Foundry. "Therefore, MARI 3 continues The Foundry's commitment to addressing not only what artists need to do but how and where they do it. This includes seamless integration with third parties, open APIs, and support for industry standards."

MARI 3 brings support for used shaders such as Unreal, as well as for OpenSubdiv geometry. Within the games market, more AAA and indie game developers have adopted MARI to create the cinematic quality characters and experiences required in today's games.

"Introducing MARI into our game pipeline on The Order: 1886 helped eliminate traditional 2D texture pipeline frustrations, allowing our team to focus their energies on meticulously crafting a rich cast of characters, creatures, weapons, and props for our world," said Nathan Phail-Liff, art director, Ready At Dawn Studios. "On top of MARI's great 3D and projection painting feature set, it also helped us out on unexpected fronts, making the authoring of technically complicated textures simple, seamless and intuitive."

Prior to MARI, 3D paint solutions could only handle a small handful of textures at one time. With MARI, artists can create and edit thousands of high resolution textures, freeing them to concentrate on their art rather than technical details. As film and television audiences demand more spectacular visual effects, MARI lets artists push their artistic imagination.

"I've used MARI for almost five years now and really don't know where I would be without it. It has been the cornerstone for all of my texture work both personally and professionally," said Justin Holt, texture paint lead, Sony Pictures Imageworks.

New features in MARI 3 include:

MODO rendering and baking
Artists can now easily check the final render quality of their work as they paint, or use MODO's baking engine to bake textures directly from within the MARI UI, reducing time spent transferring data between various applications.

Exposed node graph and Gizmos
MARI 3 introduces the first phase of the exposure of its node graph, which allows advanced users to create and edit channels and layers in a more efficient and visual manner. Artists can chose to work directly in the node graph, selecting and connecting nodes to build their final textured surface. Artists can also reduce complexity by combining frequently used functions into custom group nodes known at Gizmos. Artists can export Gizmos for use in other projects, or shared with others.

OpenSubdiv support
New support for OpenSubdiv geometry enables artists to work with subdivision surface (SDS) meshes, without the need to translate or pre-subdivide them. Subdivision surfaces combined with accurate UV layouts lets artists view and work with a better representation of the final rendered smooth surface, while making sure final textures match up.

Color space management
Color space properties, available on both images and on individual channels of multichannel images, eliminate the need to preprocess or postprocess images into the correct color space. Artists can also set color space defaults on a per project basis.

Arnold, V-Ray, Unreal and Redshift shaders
New shaders are designed to simulate those used in industry standard rendering and games engines – Arnold, V-Ray, Unreal and Redshift.

FBX geometry support
By providing support for reading geometry from FBX files, MARI 3 allows artists to work in conjunction with a range of third party and proprietary 3D solutions and source material providers.

Session scripts
The Session Scripts in MARI 3 allows artists to create a lightweight archive of a project, and combine with other archives. Artists have the ability to merge projects, see assets in context with other assets, share useful data for reuse, or set up project templates.

Developer APIs
The four new APIs are the Texture Data Access API, Geometry Data Access API, Display Driver API and Custom Graph Context API. Together, these help studios integrate MARI with their rendering pipeline, reducing the need to transfer files between applications and resulting in faster iterations and a more accurate understanding of the final context during the texture painting process.

Enhanced texture transfer
Enhancements to Texture Transfer allows artists to generate height and normal maps between high and low polygon models, seamlessly blur across patch boundaries, and correctly transfer overlapping UVs.

Entity locators
Entity Locators within MARI 3 offer a 3D manipulator that improves visual accuracy when transforming geometry inside MARI's viewport. This allows artist to translate, rotate and scale geometry more easily.

Safe mode
A new Safe mode offers easier troubleshooting by isolating the user's involvement and environment issues during debugging. This helps artists identify and isolate critical points faster when resolving scene issues.

Extended access to selection groups
Developers and TDs can now manipulate various selection groups through the Python API, allowing them to automate related functionality within their pipeline. Artists can also now access selection groups directly in the viewport.

MARI 3 will be commercially available in Q3 2015.

www.thefoundry.co.uk

(JP)