Mari new "materials" ?

gnoop

  I did several approaches to Mari and it always puzzled me by lots of  nice but at the same time  100% irrelevant  stuff,  too complicated interface and layers  and  a weird lack of what really important for modern textures.   I bet it's because of a texture resolution and lots of UDIM tiles is not that much a priority in games.   It's not even Photoshop on steroids anymore like someone described it before since it lacks what still makes me using Photoshop sometimes , the "patch" tool.  

Wonder if their new "materials" worth trying it again?  

FourtyNights

I recommend using Substance Painter, it's aimed for texturing game assets with a great PBR material preview on its viewport... if you haven't already, which would be very surprising.

gnoop

I prefer 3d coat over Substance Painter.  The brushes are better imo. I especially like an ability to paint several brush dabs randomly/alternatively and better material projecting painting system. It's pretty rudimentary in SP.     Besides 3d coat allows to paint in between UDIM tiles too.    It's somewhere in between SP and Mari imo.

musashidan

Unless you're using Mari for very high-res UDIM assets then Substance Painter is far superior for a game asset workflow. Mari's UI always reminds me of a mid-90s Amiga adventure game.

gnoop

I need to paint on a huge  terrain  having unique  UDIM unwrap for macro layer.  So SP is out of question unfortunately.   3d coat starts to freeze on more than 5-6  2048x2048 tiles, so I wonder what options I  still have.    

melviso

@huge terrain with unique udim? Is this for an offline renderer scene?

oglu

If its only basic painting i would go with mudbox. Its still one of the best handpainting tools out there if you need UDIMs.

If you try it dont use the 2019 version there are some bad bugs. Until 2019.1 is ready i recommend 2018.2

thomasp

I'd recommend Mudbox as well, it easily handles more than 5-6 tiles and at higher resolution than 2048. Also there's the 'Gigatexel' engine that allows to load and unload texture tiles on the fly. Might help in your case although I tend to just disable it for simpler character work.

Never understood how people can stand Mari. Admittedly years since I used it last but that struck me as primarily a texture manager for large tilesets with a bit of painting thrown in. Do people really texture entire assets by moving from one projection angle to the next? What a way to spend the day.

melviso

I remember looking up tutorials of Mari just to see how it works. The UI looked convulted tbh. Sometimes, simple and straight forward gets the job done. Hopefully Blender would be adding udim soon. I have used Viewport Canvas, wasn't that bad tbh but it has been undeveloped for years. 
@gnoop maybe u can give this technique a shot for your terrain. U do not need to use substance designer, the technique can be applied using other ways.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuPQNIx3dh8

Farfarer

4.5 is a first step into a material-based workflow, we've worked pretty hard on laying the foundations in this release but there's more to come out course

I'd definitely recommend giving it another go, especially if it's been some time since you tried it.

I remember getting a trial some years back to have a go and just being confused by the UI and the way it works but after running through the tutorials (which I admittedly skipped over first time around when I shouldn't have done) it makes a lot more sense and it's power becomes quite apparent.

Especially once you leave layers and get into the node graph for a node-based workflow - you can mix and match a node-based workflow with painting and masking to do a lot of cool stuff (and if you know any GLSL, writing your own nodes becomes pretty fun and easy).

And if you want to paint on a ton of huge UDIMs, it's probably your best bet. 5-6 2k tiles is nothing to Mari.

gnoop

melviso said:

@huge terrain with unique udim? Is this for an offline renderer scene?

No, it's ingame . Just a macro layer  considering most part of the terrain is just a distant, out of access background around a racing track.  Still it should get detailed texturing  for long focus replay cameras and since it' a real mountains   that should be more or less recognizable.    The texture "alternating"  technique from the video is what I do for years actually but for the distant landscape part it really should be something unique imo. 

And BTW how Jerri Ylilammi's  "bercon tiles"  could be exported to a game engine.   Special shader ? In our engine we couldn't even have a one doing UDIM automatically , only manual placement with regular multi-mat ID.     Bercon tiles is what Unreal  supports now or something?   Shader should combine all the separate textures into a single atlas?

Farfarer said:

I'd definitely recommend giving it another go, especially if it's been some time since you tried it.

And if you want to paint on a ton of huge UDIMs, it's probably your best bet. 5-6 2k tiles is nothing to Mari.

  it's not a ton of huge UDIMs.  18 tiles  2048x2048 each.      BTW, does Mari have any easy cavity/curvature filter/dynamic mask  or something?   Or it's supposed to be old school displacement + highpass + levels ? 

I'd recommend Mudbox as well

Thanks guys, I need to give it a try.   Did it very long time ago last time

melviso

gnoop said:

And BTW how Jerri Ylilammi's  "bercon tiles"  could be exported to a game engine.   Special shader ? In our engine we couldn't even have a one doing UDIM automatically , only manual placement with regular multi-mat ID.     Bercon tiles is what Unreal  supports now or something?   Shader should combine all the separate textures into a single atlas?

Bercon tiles is not supported by ue4..I think. If u read the comments section of the video, it seems there is some research on how to use this technique in ue4 by the person who made the video tutorial.

melviso

@gnoop Here is the technique with ue4:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiBhArwW7YU

gnoop

Thanks  melviso

Wonder how calculation expensive  it could really be  for modern video-cards considering amount of per-pixel calculation in a typical game scene, I mean vector noise and Ceiling function.  Or it would be just a tiny fraction among total PBR calculations?

I think I found a kind of simpler approach with same basic idea few days ago when we discussed it  last time working only for 2x2 atlas.  This ceiling idea looks much more universal although. 

melviso

I am not sure how this would affect performance or if it is expensive. This is probably tailored towards archviz. The only way to find out is give it a try and see how it holds up. I am not sure how good this technique will be for games.

CreativeSheep

Mari new Material system is excellent.  Mari can do the same as Substance Designer & Substance Painter combined although with alot of power; it's just not as easy, as most seem to like.  Although I don't find the User Interface hard, nor ugly; I guess everyone is too accustomed to pretty user interfaces with huge icons.

gnoop

CreativeSheep said:

Mari new Material system is excellent.  Mari can do the same as Substance Designer & Substance Painter combined

Does it allows to paint/clone/stamp  a complete material  to corresponding texture channels without doing it one by one?  Have brushes with separate color/ bump/roughness dabs?     Project both color and bump at least?

CreativeSheep

@gnoop
It allows everything you said, and when you said; does it allow corresponding texture channels without doing it one by one.  If you meant, can you paint; bump, spec, roughness etc simultaneously, not yet; but that is coming very soon.  

melviso

I do plan on learning Mari at some point. There is this awesome artist called zuliban:
https://www.behance.net/gallery/68874833/V-Ray-render-work-in-progress-interior
He mentions how restrictive substance painter and designer are. I also find it that way since I handpaint my textures. Does Mari use a node system as layers like substance designer? U select a node and paint on model?

gnoop

CreativeSheep said:

@gnoop
It allows everything you said, and when you said; does it allow corresponding texture channels without doing it one by one.  If you meant, can you paint; bump, spec, roughness etc simultaneously, not yet; but that is coming very soon.  

Cool,     thanks CreativeSheep

CreativeSheep

@melviso
Of course Mari has a node based workflow, which is extremely powerful; it may be expensive but it's worth it. I hope more other render engine shaders come to Mari like the Octane shader and RedShift among a few others; there is talk they are coming. Last but not least is the Mari extension pack, Jens Kafitz is a great guy really knowledgeable in Mari and helpful in the forums. 

onionhead_o

Once you go node base, you never want to go back to layers. Extension pack is the whole reason Im still using Mari.

melviso

@CreativeSheep Thanks. I also understand Mari requires a very high end graphics card to work smoothly. Can I ask what gpu u are using?