Home Technical Talk

Mari - does anyone actually use it?

2

Replies

  • MM
    Offline / Send Message
    MM polycounter lvl 17
    that looks great.

    however, the texture looks fairly simple in terms of hand painting required. and the only parts that seem hand painting were the glowy lights which you say you did in PS.

    i guess for an asset like that it would be faster in Mari give all the procedural stuff it has.

    for a more complicated character/vehicle or props i find it difficult to see how it would be faster for one or two game textures.

    but for film texture, if you needed to paint 20 x 2k textures at once then would be impossible in PS but would be very possible & efficient in Mari.
  • artquest
    Offline / Send Message
    artquest polycounter lvl 13
    MM wrote: »
    that looks great.

    however, the texture looks fairly simple in terms of hand painting required. and the only parts that seem hand painting were the glowy lights which you say you did in PS.

    i guess for an asset like that it would be faster in Mari give all the procedural stuff it has.

    for a more complicated character/vehicle or props i find it difficult to see how it would be faster for one or two game textures.

    but for film texture, if you needed to paint 20 x 2k textures at once then would be impossible in PS but would be very possible & efficient in Mari.

    The only reason I didn't do the glowy bits in mari was because it didn't have the SI slot in the shader, which it does now. Last month I had to do a similar task and did it entirely inside of mari, hand painting it with custom brushes. It was just as fast as doing it in PS. But if I had needed to do very structured windows that were squares and in rows I think to be honest I'd still have to do it in photoshop.

    So yes, I do agree when it comes to game textures it can be harder to paint details from scratch in Mari. For me the extra speed comes from being able to evaluate in context as I paint. I hate waiting for photoshop to save out the image so I can load it on to the model.
    Sometimes I will have to go back to PS to create certain things. So right now I use a lot of both.

    As a kid I did a lot of model kits and painting with a brush/airbrush, I'm really looking forward to the day when texturing gets a breakthrough on the level that zbrush was for character modelers. As great as mari is I feel like painting directly on 3d objects still has a long way to go before we get to that level.
  • jgreasley
    Starwars 1313

    Although now sadly canned, LucsArts used Mari for all of the asset texturing in 1313. They replaced the Mari shaders with their own so they had 1-1 accuracy between the Game and Mari.

    We added Dds cube maps, shadows and a few other features to support them.
  • Dataday
    Offline / Send Message
    Dataday polycounter lvl 8
    jgreasley,

    Now that the Foundry seems to be targeting a wider audience and wider industry appeal, one of the biggest hurdles for software like Mari is that its priced to fit in with the money blowing film industry. While a niche audience with a lot of money to blow is one thing, the moment the software branches out of that niche without a change of mentality, it can end up biting the software in the arse.

    What I mean to say is that for the game industry and artist at home... the price scheme and target audience might not match.

    I mean you could get nearly 3 zbrush licenses for the price of Mari. $1,995 for texturing software is just borderline insane for these kinds of markets. Zbrush even gives free updates regardless of time of purchase.

    Now that the foundry products can start to reach more people via Modo and Mari, unless the price point is competitive with similar applications, its hard to justify even wanting to work in Mari, no matter how good it is.

    My significant other works as a compositor for a vfx house thats in love with foundry products. Modo, nuke...ect they have it. When she comes home and wants to do her own stuff, she cant, because the business model/total cost of foundry products is not necessarily consumer level.

    This is probably how a lot of game artist feel regarding certain software (including some Autodesk packages).

    Thus we come right back around to the subject of if anyone actually uses Mari. I don't think many game artist would use it, at least a legal version, with the kind barrier that the foundry put up for itself in terms of self worth and pricing.

    Don't get me wrong, the Foundry makes some great products but no matter how good one can sell Mari, for games it seems like overkill. And at a ridiculous price point to boot.

    A game developer, I would assume at least, said over on the modo forums...that the developers just don't understand the game industry, the pipe line and its needs nor know how to innovate in those areas. I think that's the kind of shackles holding products like Mari and Modo back.

    -2cents...

    btw glad to see your presence here. +2 Brownie points.
  • pior
    Offline / Send Message
    pior grand marshal polycounter
    Yeah - and to add to what Dataday just said, even in big studio environments the pricing can be an issue, in an indirect way.

    For instance, when a lead is asked to budget the needs of an art team, he/she will do so according to what applications that he/she knows to be valuable production boosts. For apps that came out in the last few years or so (dDo, Topogun, Crazybump but also established yet still young industry standards like Zbrush and Mudbox) it often comes down to personal preference based on past professional work ... and personal experimentation.

    Now since no one can really justify buying Mari just for personal uses, it's very unlikely that the app will make such converts any time soon ... Even with a free demo, I have to admit that it's a bit hard to get excited about the program when it is just too expensive to buy anyways.

    The pricing of Mudbox and Zbrush is easier to swallow and really helps spreading their userbase. (Autodesk is however making the huge mistake of charging way too much for the Mudbox upgrades which are mostly just bug fixes anyways, and as a result many Mudbox users don't even bother upgrading anymore. That's another harmful scenario to keep in mind too...)

    Hope this helps !
  • jgreasley
    Hi

    Thanks for the feedback. We always appreciate honest comments about pricing and how we can address the needs of the market better.

    As we move from servicing a small number of highy demanding customers to a larger number we will reasses our levels of support and pricing accordingly. Developing for, and supporting, cutting edge vfx work is expensive. The budgets, schedules and technical demands are intense. VFX support includes everything up to flying developers on site to fix production issues at midnight. We've released 21 versions of Mari in 3 years in response to customer requests. At the moment the current price of Mari correlates pretty directly to the cost of meeting those demands.

    We understand not everyone requires or expects that level of support and are always looking at what we can do to make Mari more accessible.
  • PolyHertz
    Offline / Send Message
    PolyHertz polycount lvl 666
    Has the foundry looked into perhaps splitting Mari off then into two or more versions with different pricing levels based on features? Like have a "Mari Basic/Standard" that just has the features essential to Game artists with everything else cut in favor of a more competitive price tag, and "Mari Advanced/Extended" that contains everything?
  • Brygelsmack
    Offline / Send Message
    Brygelsmack polycounter lvl 11
    PolyHertz wrote: »
    Has the foundry looked into perhaps splitting Mari off then into two or more versions with different pricing levels based on features? Like have a "Mari Basic/Standard" that just has the features essential to Game artists with everything else cut in favor of a more competitive price tag, and "Mari Advanced/Extended" that contains everything?
    I personally don't like that setup, but indeed it could useful to others. A student version much like what Autodesk does would be very cool for Mari.
  • MM
    Offline / Send Message
    MM polycounter lvl 17
    I personally don't like that setup, but indeed it could useful to others. A student version much like what Autodesk does would be very cool for Mari.

    how will a student version be available to any professional game artists ?

    i really don't see the point of a student version in this context, but as PolyHertz mentions a basic/extended version split could be more appropriate.

    may be take out some of the features like ability to paint 5+ textures as once, or limit texture size to 8k for games. i would be ok with that for a cut in price.

    however, i know that realistically it could be more problematic to manage two software versions so i don't see that happening really.

    right now, i cant justify spending $2000 for a tool that is not my primary texture tool. i imagine it would be even more difficult for studio leads to justify it as Pior said.

    jgreasley wrote: »
    Starwars 1313

    Although now sadly canned, LucsArts used Mari for all of the asset texturing in 1313. They replaced the Mari shaders with their own so they had 1-1 accuracy between the Game and Mari.

    We added Dds cube maps, shadows and a few other features to support them.

    like i said earier, it makes sense for PBL workflows where hand painting is bare minimum for the most part. as far as i know, Starwars1313 art was PBL workflow.
  • jgreasley
    MM, I know this probably isn't that relevant as it isn't games based, but both Pixar and Dreamworks use Mari as a primary, hand painted, texture tool, so it certainly isn't limited to photo based reference only.

    From the videos and assets I saw from 1313 many were hand painted, although I'm sure someone can correct me on this if I am wrong. Lucas Arts preseted on our booth at Siggraph last year and the asset they showed then had been hand painted.
  • MM
    Offline / Send Message
    MM polycounter lvl 17
    that may be the case, i dont know what exactly they are doing so i cant reply on that.

    i brought up hand painting because in Mari, since everything is projection based i cant have my brush stamp dynamically change shape/orientation/size based on surface normal.
    this means i have to do tumble around the model lot of times to get uniform paint strokes and stamps.

    and since everything is buffer based i cant paint continuously throughout the entire mesh with ease without pausing and baking down from buffer to the mesh after every brush stroke.

    i also have to zoom in everytime to the parts where i am painting to get maximum resolution because of how the paint buffer works. i cant just paint on the entire model with big brush strokes without them being lowres pixels.

    has any of these changed in Mari 2.0 ?
    i would be glad to give it another try if so..
  • maze
    MM wrote: »
    that may be the case, i dont know what exactly they are doing so i cant reply on that.

    and since everything is buffer based i cant paint continuously throughout the entire mesh with ease without pausing and baking down from buffer to the mesh after every brush stroke.

    i also have to zoom in every time to the parts where i am painting to get maximum resolution because of how the paint buffer works. i cant just paint on the entire model with big brush strokes without them being lowres pixels.
    ..


    Hi, is not as difficult as it might seem, is just a matter of getting used to, I am doing some assets that have a lot of hand painting and procedural fractals lately. And mari is a breeze for both.

    I use auto bake on the buffer so when I move the cursor it automatically bakes what I just painted on the layer. I found out that using the split view (meaning the ortho and the uvs) helps a lot. Sometimes is just easier to paint old fashion straightly to the uvs, but having a live preview right next two is pretty cool.

    I like jumping back and forth from 3d painting to 2d painting (and by that I mean ortho and uv views switch) it depends on what you are doing. At one point it becomes automatic in your process.

    Also as previously said, mari layers are incredibly helpful, if you are hand painting you can have several layers without worrying about baking all of your paint in one place only.

    ---

    What I'll really like in mari is better tools for lookdev. I find the light system a bit hard (...although I might havent explore enough yet) to set up. I know that the shader module is a proxy preview module. But still I'll like to have better feedback from my shader network setup and my preview in mari.

    Usually I block out all of the lookdev/shaders in arnold/xsi and then paint in mari but using the color mode withouth lights/shadows. I'll like to bring some of the values in my shaders to mari to have something that comes closer to my real render!
  • MM
    Offline / Send Message
    MM polycounter lvl 17
    great! to each their own.

    i tried to texture a full character in 1.5 trial during the texture challenge they sponsored.

    i found all the lackings from Photoshop (like i mentioned earlier in this thread) to be overwhelming and costing me time and quality.

    so at the end of the day, as a freelance contractor i cannot justify buying a $2000 software that wont at least be close to my primary texture tool. i still end up doing lot of the accuracy based work in Photoshop so it isnt worth it. it became a choice between "need" and "want".

    may be that will change in future...
  • Jedi
    Offline / Send Message
    Jedi polycounter lvl 10
    MM wrote: »
    great! to each their own.

    i tried to texture a full character in 1.5 trial during the texture challenge they sponsored.

    i found all the lackings from Photoshop (like i mentioned earlier in this thread) to be overwhelming and costing me time and quality.

    so at the end of the day, as a freelance contractor i cannot justify buying a $2000 software that wont at least be close to my primary texture tool. i still end up doing lot of the accuracy based work in Photoshop so it isnt worth it. it became a choice between "need" and "want".

    may be that will change in future...


    Thats cool if you like to use all photoshop.

    For me, I like making projection stamps in ps then painting through them in mari and using both software. While I don't have examples of finished work to show you, it was definitely worth the price. I have a budget for software and plugins that I can put partially put down as a tax write off as well. I spent around 5k on plugin support and software support last year and it was worth it. However, if your all photoshop workflow is what you prefer, thats fine too :thumbup:
  • damiank
    Do you have some idea how to bake out Ptex to UV texture for game characters which need UVS? I cannot find decent tutorials~
    Did you try to use Ptex painting without UVS in MARI and export to 3D coat or software to bake out Ptex to 2D Texture?

    If this baking way is possible, I think the further of MARI would be positive&^. Could you guys share idea about possible baking way (from Ptex painting /mari to 2D texture /3D coat or other software)?
  • maze
    i tried to texture a full character in 1.5 trial during the texture challenge they sponsored.

    i found all the lackings from Photoshop (like i mentioned earlier in this thread) to be overwhelming and costing me time and quality.
    You should really take a look at v 2.0 then! they 've added layer support similar to photoshop as well as the ability to import psd files into your layer stack. Take a look at the foundry channel in youtube, Justin Holt did some really useful videos about the new improvements in mari v 2.0

    You might also find useful to have a hybrid workflow photoshop/mari relying a bit more in photoshop until you feel really comfortable with mari and then you can progressively start doing more stuff in mari itself. Thats how it happened to me at work.
    I ve been using photoshop for long time, and when I started using mari at first I felt that I was being really slow compared to the workflow I was very used to in photoshop.
    But it was a just a matter of taking the time to find things, and almost everytime, I found that the mari equivalent was better.

    As I mentioned on an earlier post, I was also doubful about the fact that I would not have my set of photoshop brushes in mari. But after digging well into mari's brushes, I found that the default ones (organic, bradbrushes, hard surface...) are top notch and fullfill pretty much all my needs at least for the time being.. in mari you can also rotate your brush and squeeze it dynamically using shortcuts, I find that alone pretty cool.

    Also you can quickly block out a base texture using triplanar projections, that is a reaally useful feature! to start of some texture types like metal, wood.

    I have a quick wishlist of things I'll like to see in mari,
    (...or maybe I don't know how to do them yet!)

    - better quality occlusion, the current one is not smooth enough from the test I've being doing even though I've being using well subdivided meshes. this would be very useful to greate garbage masks for dirt or similar stuff.

    - ability to move (translate/rotate/scale) multiple layers at once. I still find this easier to do in photoshop. Example if I have a folder with a base texture of a leaf and I create on top a new layer where paint a mask for the leaf veins. I will like then to drag duplicate multiple times that folder containing both layers I just mentioned and do scale/translate/rotate onto other "leaf" uv islands, then merge all of the leaf base texture layers into one layer, and a similar process for the leaf veins layers. I am not sure if there is a way to do this in mari. (meaning, I know you can merge layers, but not sure about duplicating/moving multiple layers)

    - also as mentioned earlier, better look development tools would be sweet!

    cheers
  • MM
    Offline / Send Message
    MM polycounter lvl 17
    ok, i will try to get a hold of 2.0 trial. however, i did buy the Mari DVD that Justin Holt did recently which uses 2.0.

    but afaik Mari doesnt have Layer styles support. not adjustment layer, but layer fx.

    i use layer styles extensively to create a wide variety of effects and have bunch of custom styles that i built over time.

    for example, i have styles that stimulate torn fabric, stitching, seams, mud splatter and dirt build up etc. these styles use varied combination of effects and patterns.

    none of these would be recognized by Mari i think, or is that supported now ?

    may be Mari has better alternative to all this!

    also, i noticed this in ideascale website:

    http://mari.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Synced-Normal-Maps/414231-15287

    i had this issue in 1.5 as well and it seems it is still there in 2.0

    if they want to cater to game artists then they need to resolve accurate and synced tangent space normal map display.
  • artquest
    Offline / Send Message
    artquest polycounter lvl 13
    I should also mention that although I haven't tried it yet...

    from the website:

    "Import custom ABR brushes from Photoshop, letting artists paint freely with brushes they know and love"

    I plan on trying this soon :D
  • pior
    Offline / Send Message
    pior grand marshal polycounter
    Regarding normalmaps - yeah, at a bare minimum Mari should be synced with the Maya-type normals. Since even if a mesh is ultimately supposed to use very engine specific normals and binormals, there's always the possibility to make an alternate bake in a regular 3D app.

    Also it goes without saying that Mari needs to support object space normalmaps too.
  • Cathodeus
    Offline / Send Message
    Cathodeus polycounter lvl 14
    My 2 cents :

    I'm a game artist with 9 years xp (mid artist/mid manager), and i recently moved to VFX industry as texturing supervisor --> Here is where i started to use Mari as texture artist/supervisor.

    My first impression as a manager was this one :

    -Painting in 3d is dangerous for productivity if inside your team you have "Perfectionists" guys. I saw one artist zooming and zooming again than painting realy small d
  • Jedi
    Offline / Send Message
    Jedi polycounter lvl 10
    Cathodeus wrote: »
    I want to be able to paint rust with a predefined diffuse color, while it update my normal map + my spec + my roughness --> With just one stroke paint !

    Here is why i super love dDo from Quixel (and god Teddy Bergsman --> I pray everyday to thank you man !). In this soft the user can tweak d
  • Cathodeus
    Offline / Send Message
    Cathodeus polycounter lvl 14
    @Jedi :

    Do you really can create a brush called let's say : Drift (i insist on a brush and not a layer system.)

    And set black in diffuse, than, black in normal map, than white in spec, etc ...

    Than use this brush Inside all your future projects/datas/objects without having to reset diff
  • Jedi
    Offline / Send Message
    Jedi polycounter lvl 10
    it will create a layer on each channel that updates at the same time to the master shared layer. They will all be black, but you can apply any layer effect to make it white, any other color, etc
  • Cathodeus
    Offline / Send Message
    Cathodeus polycounter lvl 14
    Ok it seems nice. Thanks Jedi ! I'll give 2.0 a try today. (need to know more about those shared layers).

    If it was brushes that will be nicer (because as i told before brushes once created can be used from object to objects and from project to projects, and we can share it with teamates) while sharing layers from project to project, and from colleague to colleagues will be a pain (heavier, painfull) ...

    Who share layer with photoshop ? Who share brushes ?

    I know the answer :-) Lot of person download custom brushes while none of them download layers :-)


    If someone from Digital foundry ear me please make those kind of brushes : able to paint at once Inside diff
  • maze
    i use layer styles extensively to create a wide variety of effects and have bunch of custom styles that i built over time.
    Hi, mmm... I am thinking about it and, actually Mari does not have many features like photoshop "styles" that you might be thinking of, such as stroke, bevel&emboss, glow, shadow (in/out...) etc... not that I know of at least.

    My first though is that this might be due to the fact that in film we do not want any light or shadow information baked in our textures as everything will be calculated inside the render engine to be the most accurate possible, so by difuse I now understand pure albedo (or color map) without any information other than "color" itself. I know that when I was doing textures for video games I was using a lot of photoshop layer styles to bake glows, emboss, self shadows, ao...etc.. inside my difuse texture... wich make sense in that workflow! so I am thinking that it might be one of the reasons they have not include some of those features in mari, although I am just making a simple assumption here...

    There are though some ways around to do some stuff but in mari's workflow, but I am afraid not with the flexibility of photoshop you might be used to (I am taking about layer styles)

    In mari though you can still use tileable patterns (triplanar and tiled projections) and have real time feedback which is quite cool. Some of the glow and shadow features you can trick them using masks and masks groups in combination with layer blending modes. (layer blending modes are very similar to photoshop layers)
  • marks
    Offline / Send Message
    marks greentooth
    maze wrote: »
    My first though is that this might be due to the fact that in film we do not want any light or shadow information baked in our textures as everything will be calculated inside the render engine to be the most accurate possible, so by difuse I now understand pure albedo (or color map) without any information other than "color" itself.

    "Physically-based" rendering in games is very similar, and I think we're going to see a lot more of it in the coming years.
  • MM
    Offline / Send Message
    MM polycounter lvl 17
    @ yes, [url="http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1840246&postcount=45]agreed.[/url] :)

    @ Marks, that is true that PBL based workflows require less painted/baked lighting information in the diffuse map but ti still requires quite a lot more compared to film/vfx works.

    i am currently working on some game assets that uses PBL workflow and i still have to do a lot of baked in lighitng.

    btw, i checked out 2.0 trial and seems like they fixed tangent space normal map display. it had some issues in 1.5 but seems to be working great in 2.0 which is a good step.
  • maze
    MM wrote: »

    btw, i checked out 2.0 trial and seems like they fixed tangent space normal map display.

    good to know!
  • DireWolf
    is there a way to do something similar to Photoshop's stamp tool in Mari? Playing with trial Mari atm, want to see if I can easily fix seams of existing textures.
  • ubeor
    I've tried the new Mari, I really like the new layer system, but the performance really drops when I use more than four texture slots (diffuse,specular, gloss, normal, AO) and if I have, for exemple, 6 layers in the diffuse and I want to add a new adjustment layer in the AO, the program i'ts unusable. I don't undersand why the program i'ts so power hungry, if you look at mudbox, you can have 8 textures in the diffuse, another 5 textures in the specular and 3 in the gloss, with normal map and bump map applied to the model, and the program it's still fast, it has responsive brushes, fast viewport,etc,
  • nreynolds
    Offline / Send Message
    nreynolds polycounter lvl 18
    I have a decent machine and mari runs pretty well with all those channels and layers and masks in the layers. I do get a little hiccup when i move the camera due to it baking the project then.

    I just learned about cache and you can cache a layer and that speeds things up. That's what the color bars on the right are telling you.

    Something awesome about mari is the ability to instance your layers so you can paint in your diff and update all your other maps at the same time. Painting grime in the diffuse while updating your gloss and spec is pretty awesome.



    @direwolf there is a clone tool.
  • Goobatastic
    Offline / Send Message
    Goobatastic polycounter lvl 8
    So i am trying to work out how to fit mari into my game asset pipeline. I have created a model in zbrush with a number of subtools which totals to around 32million polys. I would like to texture in mari next, so what would be my step? Do i decimate it as best as i can and take into mari then paint ?
    or do i create a low mesh bake my normals from the high mesh to it then take my low res mesh and normal information and plug that into mari and paint my diffuse, reflection and roughnessmaps.
    Im sorry if this has been covered in the thread already.
  • thomasp
    Offline / Send Message
    thomasp hero character
    So i am trying to work out how to fit mari into my game asset pipeline. I have created a model in zbrush with a number of subtools which totals to around 32million polys. I would like to texture in mari next, so what would be my step? Do i decimate it as best as i can and take into mari then paint ?
    or do i create a low mesh bake my normals from the high mesh to it then take my low res mesh and normal information and plug that into mari and paint my diffuse, reflection and roughnessmaps.
    Im sorry if this has been covered in the thread already.

    i suppose you found your answer a while ago but you would have to create a mesh with your desired poly resolution and uv set and use that in mari.

    i'm using the software (2.x) right now as well and am wondering if a paint mirror function a la mudbox can be expected in the not too distant future? actually i really also miss the ability to switch between projection painting and the style that tracks the surface. deep paint 3d had it a decade ago...

    also - how do i bake the ambient occlusion in mari? i tried applying it as a mask and filling the patches with my desired color - nada, fill simply ignores the mask.

    and why is the paint result with the mask applied quite different (brightness/coverage) depending on zoom level (even when painting in the UV view)? that makes it really hard to achieve consistent results.

    also i seem to have the same issue when selecting faces to create selection sets - i have to zoom in all the way to select the tiny ones. cumbersome, especially without mirroring.

    lastly, the naming convention mari uses for the uv tiles - can this be customized somehow inside the software - or scripted on im/export? it is quite the headache to transfer over a mudbox tileset for one and the system is limited to 10 patches in U direction anyway, which seems a strange choice for tile naming in a tool supposedly good at managing large tilesets.

    thanks :)
  • fr0gg1e
    Offline / Send Message
    fr0gg1e polycounter lvl 17
    thomasp wrote: »
    i suppose you found your answer a while ago but you would have to create a mesh with your desired poly resolution and uv set and use that in mari.

    Altho Mari is pretty good to deal with insane polygon count (just saying).
    i'm using the software (2.x) right now as well and am wondering if a paint mirror function a la mudbox can be expected in the not too distant future? actually i really also miss the ability to switch between projection painting and the style that tracks the surface. deep paint 3d had it a decade ago...

    There is a mirror paint buffer option, it looks like a plus sign for disable the +|+ for mirror horizontal...It's located in the top toolbar next to the lighting mode (flat / full and so on). Unfortunately it's not based on geometry but on view so it can be a pain to use...Altho with patch mirroring I barely use it TBH. I also have a script that I downloaded on the mari's ideascale website that mirror the paint buffer in case you need it.

    As for tracking the surface, last I've heard it wasn't in their plan ;( But hey if enough people ask for it, you never know... =)
    also - how do i bake the ambient occlusion in mari? i tried applying it as a mask and filling the patches with my desired color - nada, fill simply ignores the mask.

    Object menu at the top, then select Ambient occlusion. Once it's done calculating, go to the layer palette, and then in the procedurals, there is geometry> Ambient occlusion. Be aware that Mari is calculating AO based on vertices and it's not a true AO (impossible to do cavities as well). Shame ;( I'd love it to be able to compute AO. I do my AO in Mudbox when I need specifics like cavity and so on...Then use them as masks.

    But if you want to use it as a mask, add a procedural color layer, then create a mask / reveal all, then a mask group. Open the mask group then add the procedural AO layer on top, and an invert adjustment layer on top to revert the BW and you're done.

    At any moment you can as well convert that procedural to paintable by right clicking the layer and convert to paintable. Then you can as well flatten the mask group. Multiple possibilities there (helps sometimes if your computer is lagging to bake some procedurals...Or cache them).
    and why is the paint result with the mask applied quite different (brightness/coverage) depending on zoom level (even when painting in the UV view)? that makes it really hard to achieve consistent results.

    Only thing I can think of is check your masking to see if it's on or off. Often weird result I have is when I am applying a mask and it's not displayed as I turned it off. I got busted a lot of time thinking my Mari was going crazy when in fact masking was affecting my UV view.
    also i seem to have the same issue when selecting faces to create selection sets - i have to zoom in all the way to select the tiny ones. cumbersome, especially without mirroring.

    Use grow? When you press S to select, there is then options at the top to grow selection. Might help.
    lastly, the naming convention mari uses for the uv tiles - can this be customized somehow inside the software - or scripted on im/export? it is quite the headache to transfer over a mudbox tileset for one and the system is limited to 10 patches in U direction anyway, which seems a strange choice for tile naming in a tool supposedly good at managing large tilesets.

    Nope. Mari and Mudbox are using different naming conventions. If you want to not have to deal with all that, head over: http://www.jenskafitz.com/texture-tools/maprenamer/ download this and you'll be able to auto rename everything back from mudbox / mari / zbrush...Pretty awesome for the time being (until AD are supporting UDIMs).

    Hope it helps!
  • thomasp
    Offline / Send Message
    thomasp hero character
    fr0gg1e wrote: »
    There is a mirror paint buffer option, it looks like a plus sign for disable the +|+ for mirror horizontal...

    yeah, that i know. i have not figured out a use for this function though. what could one possibly do with a 4-way mirror paint that does not conform to a surface?
    the stuff in the patches menu is news to me however and that looks definitely useful for the job at hand.
    Only thing I can think of is check your masking to see if it's on or off. Often weird result I have is when I am applying a mask and it's not displayed as I turned it off. I got busted a lot of time thinking my Mari was going crazy when in fact masking was affecting my UV view.

    strangely enough i did not enounter this after posting here about it.

    Nope. Mari and Mudbox are using different naming conventions. If you want to not have to deal with all that, head over: http://www.jenskafitz.com/texture-tools/maprenamer/ download this and you'll be able to auto rename everything back from mudbox / mari / zbrush...Pretty awesome for the time being (until AD are supporting UDIMs).

    Hope it helps!

    that definitely helped! thanks man!
  • Rav3
    Offline / Send Message
    Rav3 interpolator
    Mari is supa-dupa-awesome software but it doesn't support stretched textures like 1024x512 =(( and I still can't figure out how to draw PBR texture there, it has shaders but you can't paint all texture at once easily like in substance painter but substance painter miss clone tool and lot of options. Jesus where to texture PBR? Quixel suit is nice but cylinder, sphere etc. shapes seams need to be fixed somehow in external software :D
2
Sign In or Register to comment.