Mari, Texture Painting at 32k!!
polycounter lvl 9
Holy Texture density batman!
Seems to be the tool used on Avatar, estimates of a price ca. €500 (sweet)
http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/pkg_overview.aspx?ui=3366FFA1-E59B-4772-9BB3-94F496491576
http://www.fxguide.com/article604.html
that there is everything i use photoshop for.
Seems to be the tool used on Avatar, estimates of a price ca. €500 (sweet)
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.
http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/pkg_overview.aspx?ui=3366FFA1-E59B-4772-9BB3-94F496491576
http://www.fxguide.com/article604.html
* 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
that there is everything i use photoshop for.
Replies
I think you mean euros cool software though wonder if they will release demo
Yeah, I laughed when i saw them, especially considering the clarity of the interface shot.
Those huge maps probably went straight to renderman as a memory mapped format. I cant image how a renderer could handle them otherwise.
They say 1 gb Texture memory and 2-4gb ram will run it just fine.
yeah and apparently mudbox 2011 runs on these specs
Intel® Pentium® 4 or higher
AMD Athlon 64
AMD Opteron processor
* 2 GB RAM
* 650 MB free hard drive space
* Certified hardware-accelerated OpenGL® graphics card
well to be honest it might run but it probably wont actually be useful on that rig
UI looks nice and clean too and dosent cost an arm and a leg.
Makes you wonder why Autodesk arn't developing stuff like this and just keep rolling out the same software every year with minor updates!
EDIT: Theres a small preview in this months 3DWorld.
MB paints beautifully on my Macbook pro. 2GB Ram 2.5 ghz processor and mobile graphics. Multiple layered 4k no worries.
surprising, seems like I havent had the same experience as others have. Anyway we will see what mari holds in store
Look forward to trying this out once its released.
this is obviously something designed mostly for huge cg matte paintings.
other tools we already use can do pretty much the same or in fact a lot more.
mudbox loads rigged meshes and you can pose the limbs as well as save different poses in layers.
and can do a lot more.bodypaint has more painting features.zbrush sculpts and textures as well and can do a lot more. oops forgot photoshop.
This is an impressive by numbers but very specialized and limited tool.
Easy to understand interface, runs natively on linux.
It also states in the article that it has been tested by games folk and its a "new marketplace" for them. Hopefully we see some game specific stuff in the future.
I guess I should have said it's not useful for game development NOW. Someday we'll have 32k textures on everything! If I'm correct IdTech4 already uses textures that large for very large terrain surfaces but not on tiny props or characters.
Oh gawd Bodypaint is horrible. Navigation hell. Mucho Brush lag. Pain
i'd give it atleast 10. it'll take a few generations for consoles to reach that kind of hardware, even though PCs will reach it a generation before. also, we need virtual texturing to be further refined.
also, if id tech 6 is all that they're hyping it to be (what with the virtually no polygon limit), than we'd be able to truly do the textures justice.
Or Autodesk will buy them out and screw us all
If this is really going to be 500 then that is some really stiff competition right there, which is great for consumers.
Though you can have 32k maps, it doesn't mean you have to use them...it would work perfectly fine with 2 or 4k right? :P
Theoretically you can create 30k maps in Photoshop but nobody ever does lol
What im trying to get at is this...If you buy a 300w stereo, how often are you going to actually play music that loud? The more powerful the stereo, the cleaner the audio is at lower volumes because you have such a massive amount of head room for everything to breathe.
Realistically i dont think that anyone other than places like Weta or ILM are going to use 32k maps for a long long time, but it nice to know that you can go much higher than you will ever need without your system dropping dead.
Did i miss a memo?
Idtech 6?...Do tell! ^^
Well, all in all, i have to say that this does look pretty sweet and the Weta guys certainly seem to have a talent for creating good software.
First Mudbox and now this?
Thats a pretty good record right there
1: great feature set. their list covers my workflow for texture painting totally without the need to continually drop a projection into photoshop.
2: They're claiming this can handle extemely high resolution textures a high levels of interactivity, that implies to me that anything I'm going to throw at it wont phase it at all. Im hoping for something that lets me work without too much slowdown as the layers pile up
This is all conjecture until we can actually use it. if nothing else it will plant a boot up autodesks arse
Numbers are very impressive. we artists are thrown "gazillion of polygons and dozens of megapixels texture sizes" and we are easily impressed like little kids. Because we are
"Extreme nanopolygonal vectorized sudivisional picosurfaces that generate trillions of polygons and we can take it" Beat that!!!!
it's like going over 32bit colours...pointless...
Would you be using these advanced features in any part of your workflow? (assuming you work for games)
I am talking about the GB of textures and trillions of polygons. The rest exist in current applications as well. Many studios well known too are still working with 3dsmax9! or even photoshop CS2. why? Because what they do doesn't require an upgrade.
A typical model\texture workflow will be covered and improved greatly by viewport canvas right now not having to send a model out of 3dsmax for texturing at all and not having to spend an extra dime for a separate application. To me, viewport canvas is potentially a true revolution when it comes to streamlining game asset production.
Or if it doesn't really work as advertised
You think it is because of that tool that avatar looked that awesome? I don't.
As a potential tool for future workflows with super tessellated DX 11 environments for gaming with mega-textures perhaps if we had such workflows, IF, that would be quite useful.
I bet next year they will come up with something even better version than this. With tools we might actually need and use. Lets just wait and see how future unfolds. It is indeed a very promising beginning.
[ame]
This example is for editing terrain textures, but since all textures (model/character/terrain) are stored in the megatexture, you could potentially have per-animation frame textures stored for a character. The biggest reason for not doing so in games is texture loading, which is what MT solves.
I could be wrong about the animated texture stuff, I haven't really seen the stuff in person, but based on released info I assume it's possible. Anyone that's got some real experience with a virtual texturing system are welcome to correct me on this.
As for Bodypaint, it gets kinda unstable after passing a certain amount of textures. It still doesn't like anything above 4K, and as I've heard there's some trouble with proper 64 bit support as well. Not sure on the specifics, being a modeler, but we sure stress it regularly with our stuff and it's still just game cinematics and not movie levels of detail...
UI looks nice and clean, uses QT so it should be very customisable.
Video of Mari in action
Fuck me..500 quid for all that gravy....<long whistle>
Indeed, that video make it look awesome. 500 pounds is very different to $500 listen on fxGuide. I wonder which it will be.
good to see that they guys developing this (just like the mudbox ones) seem to take quite some inspiration in functionality and interface from the good old studiopaint 3d. now that is an app that does deserve to be revived.