MARI Indie 2.6v5 is now live

BladeEvolence

We are pleased to announce that MARI Indie has now been updated to 2.6v5!

New Features

The Unreal Shader is now included in MARI indie.

A new Unreal Environment Map is now included in MARI indie.

The UV patch limit has been raised from 2 to 6 patches.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/289550

Feature Enhancements

BUG ID 48726 - The ability to set a keyboard shortcut to toggle projection (Project On) between All and Selected Only has been added.

BUG ID 48728 - The ability to set a keyboard shortcut to toggle Source Grade as enabled or disabled has been added.

BUG ID 48763 - Images within the Image Manager palette can now be managed and organized under custom tabs to avoid the palette becoming crowded and difficult to manage.

Bug Fixes

BUG ID 44931 - The vertical axis on the color blender was inverted.

BUG ID 45559 - When using shared groups, Mari did not make it clear, on selection of a group, which other groups were shared, and therefore also selected. Additionally, shared layers and paint targets were also not clearly indicated.

BUG ID 48533 - The LGPL copyright notice was missing from the About dialog within Mari.

BUG ID 48737 - Individual adjustments using the Warp tool were not logged in the undo stack, meaning all adjustments were undone at once.

BUG ID 48765 - Individual adjustments using the Slerp tool were not logged in the undo stack, meaning all adjustments were undone at once.

BUG ID 48784 - The Warp tool did not store creation or clearing of the grid as separate events in the undo stack.

BUG ID 43949 - Changed Levels Filter code structure to bypass usage of LUT and allow for a per-pixel operation on the texture.

BUG ID 46183 - Fixed clamp setting of Adjustment Layer Levels to be Disabled by default.

Brandon R. Reddick
MODO/MARI Indie Advocate
The Foundry

Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
~Master Yoda

slipsius

No link or anything?

BladeEvolence

slipsius wrote: »

No link or anything?

Sorry about that, updated post with it. 8)

ironbearxl

Thanks Brandon, the increase in UV patches is welcome! I just bought the perpetual version yesterday and have been digging through the documentation.

Btw, what is virtual texture in the gpu preferences for?

spitty

great news! i'll have to fire up mari this weekend and try it out some more.

Greg_Brown

ironbearxl wrote: »

Thanks Brandon, the increase in UV patches is welcome! I just bought the perpetual version yesterday and have been digging through the documentation.

Btw, what is virtual texture in the gpu preferences for?

What you see in the viewport on your model is a virtual texture and this sets the resolution of that texture. Raising it can help with flickering and directly afects the displayed resolution of the texture in the Mari viewport. I usually keep that set fairly low, I don't see much if any tearing or flickering and it doesn't affect the final image. I have mine set at 8k but this is dependent on how much GPU memory you have.

ironbearxl

Thanks Greg, that helps!

nervouschimp

Very cool, Brandon! Now Mari just needs true multi-channel material painting like 3d-coat and Substance Painter, and I'll be tempted... Unless that functionality has already been improved? Are there any tutorials on using Mari for UE4 assets? I know you guys are busy, but a quick video would be helpful. Last I checked, multi-channel painting in Mari was really convoluted compared to the competition, and if that has improved, or if you have helpful tips then I would be excited to see that in a quick video tut.

JedTheKrampus

You can do multichannel painting in a couple of ways. Option number one which I personally prefer is setting bake behavior to manual. For a specular color setup I have a layer on top of my albedo channel that's all black and a layer on top of my specular channel that's all 0.04 linear. Each of these has a layer mask or mask stack. So what I'll do if I'm painting a non-metal material is paint its color on some layer on the albedo with the painting blending mode set to Normal, then switch channels to the specular channel, go into my mask on the top layer, and switch the painting blending mode to Linear Dodge or some brightening mode. I then bake the painting again. If the top layer isn't opaque enough I bake it again. If it's too opaque I go into the projection palette and lower the projection opacity.

After this is done you can go into your gloss and bump channels and bake the painting to a layer mask. Then after you've got all the colors down for this material you can go back the gloss and bump channels and use that layer mask to help you define a detailed texture for the gloss and bump as needed. When you're ready to move to another view you clear the paint buffer with Ctrl+Shift+C.

The other way to do it which I find to be kind of clumsy to set up is layer sharing, which involves instancing layers across the layer stacks from different channels and stacking adjustment layers and groups on those instances until they look right. It's completely non-destructive so maybe it would be better to do things this way if you need to art-direct a large project, but I find this way of working to be clunky and slow, and it slows down Mari a lot too as the layer stack gets longer. I don't think it's worth it in most cases compared to the manual-bake strategy.

gnoop

I think the main problem of Mari is that it was created around Photoshop style "painting".
While my workflow has always been driven by a principle that could be expressed as " less you paint by hand , better textures are and less time they take"

So my textures are rather assembled than painted. From fragments rendered in Zbrush plus libraries of details . So if i need to add some rust I have a brush library of actual rust stains , not black and white brush dabs.

God bless 3dcoat for being capable to paint randomly using the whole brush library , something like animated brush in Gimp or image hose in Painter can do.

Too bad Photoshop can't do so. I still prefer it over 3d coat for many things.

Too bad Mari recreates Photoshop approach. I already have one, very affordable. So don't need another one.

Current Photoshop linked smart objects are actually better system than all that layers mess in Mari.

To bad there is still no convenient texture composer. Substance designer looks like a few steps off but those steps it lacks are very core. Fusion is closer but not texture focused at all.

nervouschimp

OK, thanks, Jed. That sounds -horrible- actually. I think I'll just stick to 3d-coat and Allegorithmic until The Foundry gets around to updating their workflows. Yuck, how do people put up with that? I know Mari gets used a lot in film. Have film artists just never been introduced to the other options? Is it that Mari is the only tool that can handle the large data sets, so they just deal with it? But that advantage has been stripped out of the indie version. Can't even paint an 8k map.

JedTheKrampus

Yeah it's a pretty yucky workflow and I like 3D Coat way better actually. It can run on a potato (eg my 2011 laptop with integrated graphics) and it's way easier to paint multiple channels. Layer mask nonsense notwithstanding it's a pretty strong contender for what we do.

Dataday

I'm of the same mind regarding Mari. It's just so damn convoluted and it eats up resources like a hog... to the point where you have to constantly micromanage your channels and the layers within those channels..as well as what they are linking to.

Still, its a good option for those who need a painting app for $150 and dont mind the unnecessarily convoluted workflow(indie, as opposed to its clearly ridiculous full price of $2000 for the pro version). If you keep it simple its not that bad, a few channels with a few layers. No symmetry painting either.