Foundry, the leading software developer for media and entertainment, today recently released Mari 4.7.
From the introduction of its versatile Materials System in Mari’s 4.5 release to Geo-Channels added in 4.6, this latest release is poised to continue to help artists tackle the toughest challenges in texturing and look development.
Speaking to AnimationXpress, Foundry representative informed, “Mari 4.7 is focusing on interoperability and efficiency, with a new procedural mask workflow, improved Shelf Palette, and Material System enhancements.”
Mari 4.7’s key features include a new procedural Mask Workflow for rapid application of mesh driven procedural mask presets. These workflows empower artists with more creative freedom on even the largest assets and allow artists to author, share and use procedural presets to fill the look of a channel and mask layers, quickly accelerating the work of whole teams.
Mari product manager Rory Woodford shared, “We are continuing to focus on improving the artist’s workflow by making Mari more intuitive: artists can now easily organize their libraries of materials, brushes, images, and procedurals, while the new UI allows for rapid selection and application of mesh map driven procedural mask presents. Efficiency and interoperability continue to be at the center of our strategy as we know texturing and look development artists often use more than one tool for their project – ensuring shots can be viewed seamlessly in Mari and Katana will allow for faster and more creative iterations.”
The improved Shelf Palette provides an elegant way for artists to visualize and use large libraries of presets, featuring a tailored UI so artists can enjoy large graphical previews with informative data and easy access to all content with extensive filtering.
Interacting with individual materials in a complex, layered material set up is now simple with a new shader mode to view materials in isolation without changing any layer visibility settings, allowing artists to fine-tune their materials within the same lighting scenario as the more complex layered material.
Look development artists can now iterate faster between Mari and Katana to fine-tune their work due to a focus on interoperability. The Post Process feature was added to Bake Point Export Streaming to ensure that look development artists can stream Mari texture data directly into Katana render engine’s native formats with each export.