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MARI 1.5 released


Taros
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Mari works really good. Some users compare and accept higher prices when they get stable tools or good support. But in my opinion a stable tool is worth more than a good support only... When I need to contact the support too much, then there is something wrong too.

Anyway. You get a very good solution with mari, if you are working with very high poly and very high resoluted textures. This is something that is a must in the film industry. But mari steps slowly into the game industry too. See the latest features, like normalmap painting.

As I know they give fast feedback to the clients and the tool is really stable.

At least your clients define what you will use. And if a client needs high quality content, then you don't have much choices, even if other tools include better basic tools.

For me currently 3D Coat is the 1st choise, because it is perfect for delivering games graphics compared to the price - even if there are still some annoing bugs inside... But over last 20 years I took the word "workaround"... ;)

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Mari is really not suited to games. For me, personally, it's biggest downside is projection only painting which just isn't very acceptable when you're not using gazillions of textures at high resolution.

It's just a bit overkill.

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Mari's target is not games, at least not the primary target of the foundry.

It's the vfx/cinematic/movie sectors. And they're are quite strong at what they do.

You also have to understand as mudbox was created by weta (skymatter) for king kong, mari was created for avatar by weta under the foundry... They're production ready tools, quite young, lacking ton of functions but very robust !

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Mari is really not suited to games. For me, personally, it's biggest downside is projection only painting which just isn't very acceptable when you're not using gazillions of textures at high resolution.

It's just a bit overkill.

Mari is being used by LucasArts to make Starwars Level 1313.

They've ported their game shaders over to Mari so they have a 100% the same view in Mari that they have in-game. They can also export shader settings back from Mari to the engine. This makes it much more of a full look-development environment than just a texture painting tool.

All of the assets in 1313 are painted and look-developed inside of Mari.

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ooooook... lets fight begin ! :D

3DC vs MARI - FEATURES hand to hand,

- what 3DC have, what we dont need, what is needed urgently ?

regards !

--------------------------------------------

Workflow

- Seamlessly handle patch-based textures with new Maya texture export functionality

- OpenColorIO colour space toolbar

- Layered PSD import and export functionality

- Linux or Windows

- High quality turntable rendering

- Flatten and round-trip projected textures for modifying externally (for example in NUKE or Adobe© Photoshop©)

- Open and extensible approach to UI, geometry, camera, shading, and supporting light and texture exchange

- Import and export as background tasks, allowing the artist to continue painting

- Embedded web browser for quick access to community forum

- Fully featured and open playtime colour management system

- Filters with real time preview and fully featured colour correction

- Save states for textures to have multiple versions that can be reverted back to later

- Fully customisable navigation allowing remap your MARI experience to meet artist needs

Painting

- Paint symmetrical objects faster with new mirroring support in MARI’s paint buffer

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

- Get results faster with MARI’s new Luminosity paint through mode, letting artists move from luminosity to alpha, adding live transparencies quickly and easily without having to jump back and forth from Photoshop

- Triplanar projection for faster set up of scenes

- Versatile shader system with seven NEW shader modules

- UV-less workflow (PTEX) that gives the ability to adjust texture size on a per-face level allowing for near-limitless detail

- Fully customisable brush engine

- 'Paint through' and 'clone from' between layers and textures (including 'clone from' on-surface)

-'Slurp' brush for smearing and dragging texture

- Paint canvas transform, grid warp and free-form 'pin' warp

- Blur and sharpen, including on-surface, multiple UV patches simultaneously

- Advanced 'healing' brush for seam removal and duplication of texture detail

- Linked Patches enabling easily replication of texture data across patches without having to cut and paste

- New Tint and Stencil mode allowing easily lay down of decals and more, using MARI Paint Through tool

Environment

- Shadow support lets artists cast real-time shadows on objects from multiple light sources

- Create amazing environment effects and accurately match the final look of assets with new DDS cube map support

- Create normal maps on the fly from bump maps to simplify and give flexibility to the artistic process

- masked filters: colour correction filter, noise filter and masked blend constant colour

- Filters with real-time preview

- Advanced channel masking engine, including mask painting, surface falloff, masking one channel to another, and by depth

- Supports customisable real-time 3D shader preview (e.g. specular highlights, displacement preview via bump mapping, ambient occlusion, layer blending modes, colour correction and more

- Customisable tool 'shelves' for brushes, colours, reference images, sharable between artist and projects

- Floating point, 16 bit or 8 bit channels

- All painting and shading tools are available in 3D projection paint mode and 'flat' UV paint mode

- Background plates for reference

- Imports multiple camera moves through which the model can be viewed

- Spherical environment mapping to simulate a shiny reflective surface

- Tiled textures with masking to quickly cover large areas on models

Models

- Save time with new support for overlapping UVs, allowing the same texture to be re-used across 3D models in shared UV space

- obj model format support

- Multiple objects, versions (e.g. high res or in key character poses), instances, with or without baked animation

- Interactively handles very large 3D model data sets, scaling to over 1 million polygons for a single topology or mesh

- Supports large textures up to 32K x 32K pixels

- Handles thousands of textures per model, over many channels

- Seamlessly supports hundreds of UV texture patches

- Handles animated geometry and animated textures

- Isolate, select, mask and hide geometry per patch and face

- Customisable lighting and rendering modes

- Massive geometry and texture data sets not limited by the amount of RAM

- Dynamic tessellation shader that can preview displacement maps on geometry in real-time

Developer

- C API enabling an open interface for integration, automation and customisation

- Python scripting API

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Accepting the limitations of 3DCoat is something I have done. It is what it is, a one man or at times 2 man development application.

I do not think Andrew desires to increase his staff choosing rather to stay small in scale.

This is the reason I do not compare 3DCoat to other software but take the tools that the application gives us and use them.

If I so desire, I can buy Mari, Zbrush or a host of other applications to get more tools at my disposal.

Also if 3DCoat had all the all the features, of Zbrush, Mari combined with the tool sets now in 3DCoat and a renderer like renderman, we would be paying about 6 thousand dollars for it... ouch...

I think we all agreed though that version 4 of 3DCoat needs to be the most stable and bug free version to be released by Andrew.

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...

I think we all agreed though that version 4 of 3DCoat needs to be the most stable and bug free version to be released by Andrew.

Absolutely.

@Registered mantis users: So please check all mantis bugs and support them, if you have the feeling they should be fixed or reminded. There are some bugs existing already a very long time...

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