I’m very pleased to be able to say that we have recently brought a license of The Foundry’s new texture program, Mari.

Mari is pretty much a revolution in texturing, it’s already making Photoshop look pretty old hat and stagnant as far as 3D is concerned. I’ve had high hopes for Photoshop’s 3D features of recent years but found them very lacking for serious professional 3D work. Mari was originally created in-house at Weta Digital, as no product on the market was deemed suitable for the sheer amount of texture data needed for James Cameron’s stunning film Avatar.

There is a lot of innovation here, my favourites are:

• A great time saver, you can flick between painting in 3D (directly onto the mesh), and in 2D (in the UV unwrapped view) instantly, no more jumping from app to app to app, this is all you need to texture high-end models.
• Looking back on texture management without Mari it was a bit of a nightmare. If you multiply the number of objects in your production, by the amount of texture channels, by the number of layers in each channel, by the amount of UV patches for each – then you have a whopping number of things to name, grade and finesse to get the final look. Mari is focused on dealing with hundreds or thousands of very hi-res (up to 32x32k – but I didn’t dare test that!) images.
• Painting over multiple UV patches and onto multiple object across UV seams is now simple.
• 3D procedural effects such as blur and noise work over UV seams, at the 2D stage in the old days you would have a lot of clean-up work to do here.
• If you paint an important texture channel once (for example a scratch mask) you can reference that multiple times throughout your shader without additional overheads. Traditionally in Photoshop each time you re-use an old channel it is a copy, not a ‘clone’ reference so it needs a lot more RAM.
• PTEX support is coming soon, cannot wait for this one, as the death of UV’s can’t come a day too soon for me!

The Foundry are developing this aggressively and have a good team of engineers on board, looking forward to seeing what happens in the near future here. I’m hoping for a whole range of 3D procedural texture effects that we can bake into our maps.