Mari for beginners Archives - Meshmen studio

Handle Mari Colorspace like a PRO | Mari Quick Take

meshAdmin — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 13:12:43 +0000

In this Mari QuickTake tutorial, we look at how you can easily add colourspace to the names of your exported files. This can be an essential step in a color-managed pipeline, or if you want to use other DCCs texture conversion tools. Renderman texture manager is one of these tools that will look at these names and set the conversion accordingly

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The difference between 2d and 3d Materials | Mari tutorial

meshAdmin — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 14:34:21 +0000

When using Mari, you must understand the difference between 2d and 3d material. In this Mari tutorial, we look at the difference as well as create a gizmo to help out creating the quite laborious task of creating a 3d material using Tri planar projections.

In an earlier episode I created an automatic bake pass to remove uv seams and I used one of these materials to bridge the UV vs Projected materials. If you want to have a recap, you can follow this link


The Gizmo created from using Tri-PLanar Projections that can be used as a base in your material creation Can be found here on Gumroad

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Why your Mari Material might look like a dumpster on fire!

meshAdmin — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 14:21:59 +0000

Mari Smart Materials need baked textures to function properly, In the Mari tutorial, we look at why a Smart material might not look as expected and how to fix any missing geo bakes that drive your Mari Smart Material. In Mari material you will often find ambien occlusion and curvature to drive the material, in the same way Substance painters material uses baked maps to drive the material.

If you don’t know how to bake the textures properly, I made another in-depth tutorial you can find here

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Create Mari Smart Material, like in substance, But smarter!

meshAdmin — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 11:40:42 +0000

Innovative Materials in VFX and Texturing rely on having pre-baked texture passes to drive individual materials and apply various coatings in layers. This could be a metal material at the bottom with a paint coat and dirt on top. A curvarture tetxure could drive the edge wear and scratches in the paint revealing the metal. Occlusion texture could drive the application of dirt collecting on top of the material.

In this Mari Tutorial, we look at creating your own Mari Smart Materials using stock materials shipped with Mari. You can use this method with any material, even the ones you have made yourself. We also look at the basics of the Mari node graph when editing and combining our Mari Smart Materials using Mari multichannel marge nodes, and we also use baked textures from the new Mari bakery to drive the effects using Ambient Occlusion and Curvature. I also made the material available for free on Gumroad if you want to look at the material and learn how it was assembled.

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Mari Material tutorial | Upgrade your stock materials

meshAdmin — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 20:48:18 +0000

In this Mari tutorial, we continue from the previous episode by altering one of the stock materials shipped with Mari. We add controls to the Specular Roughness, bump, and expose the parameters we add so it’s easy to control the settings for the artist directly from the node editor or the layer stack in Mari. The tutorial uses Mari 7 and the principles work for the Non-commercial Mari version you can also download and follow along. Make sure to pick up the asset that is free on Gumroad.

Mari includes an example material design projection in the Help menu that contains a finished material setup for you to explore, backward engineer, and tweak inside the Node Graph. This is great if you are new to material creation in Mari, and want to learn more about Node Graph material workflows

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Do you have UV seams in Mari? Get rid of them fast!

meshAdmin — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 20:40:55 +0000

Do you have UV seams visible in Mari? In this tutorial, we get rid of them fast. We look at how you can use both the Mari node graph as well as the layer stack to quickly create a utility mask to blend in a 3d tri-planar material on top of a 2d material to hide any visible seams

UV seams can be a problem on complex assets where you have to manually go in and paint. You get UV seams when you use the underlying UV and tiled 2d textures across the 3d mesh. Using this method you can somewhat automate the process, especially on complex geometries with many seams

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Mari Layers and Material Workflow tutorial

meshAdmin — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 20:31:31 +0000

In this Mastering Mari 7 Layers, we take a look at the Material layer tools and how you can use them to maximize your layer texturing workflows, we begin the texturing of the asset you can also download and follow along for free. We use materials from the Mari shelf and repurpose them for our needs. We also look at how to extract alpha masks we later use to blend between materials using layer methods.

Materials are created from multiple texture files, procedurals, or plain colors, which can be used to accurately represent how light interacts with real-world materials. This method of shading is called Physically Based Rendering (PBR). You can apply these materials to your assets for a more realistic result as well as establish a base line look for your asset before adding more bespoke paint and crafting details.

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Mari Layers Tutorial | Everything you need to know

meshAdmin — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 20:21:13 +0000

Mari layers are the foundation for every new texture artist, you might come from Substance Painter and feel that going straight into the node graph is one bridge too far. Fear not we got you covered in this introduction to Mari Tutorial course. You can download the Free asset and follow along. If you are brand new and don’t even own a copy of Mari, to begin with, the course is suited for the non-commercial version of Mari that you can download from the Foundry site

This episode serves as an insightful overview, providing a compass for navigating the diverse functionalities that the layer tools bring to your creative arsenal. Join us as we lay the foundation for a more profound understanding, setting the stage for upcoming episodes where we will immerse ourselves in various workflows, peeling back the layers to reveal the nuanced techniques and strategies that will amplify your mastery of Mari 7 Layers.

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Mari 7 New Bakery in-depth overview

meshAdmin — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 18:10:33 +0000

Baking plays a crucial role in the toolkit of a texture artist. It facilitates the transfer of intricate details from high-resolution (high-poly) models to low-resolution counterparts, significantly reducing the computational resources required. This process not only expedites the creation of certain materials and effects but also eliminates the need to repaint each iteration. For instance, when dealing with an edge wear mask, rather than starting from scratch each time, one can generate a curvature map as a foundation.

At its core, baking involves the conversion and flattening of dynamically computed 3D geometry into a 2D texture map. The resulting baked texture map acts as a static snapshot of surface properties, which can be applied to a lower-poly mesh to introduce detail within the shader.

Rendering, texturing, or animating with high-resolution 3D source data often proves computationally prohibitive. In contrast, a 2D texture map efficiently captures the same intricate details without compromising fidelity.

In this new version of Mari we now finally see this very powerful feature being fully implemented as a core function, something we previously had to resort to using 3rd part software

In this tutorial, we take an in-depth look as well as offer an alternative even more powerful solution to automate the baking and processing of baked data

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Mari channels tutorial | Become A Texture Artist

meshAdmin — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 08:46:21 +0000

Learn Mari non-commercial and master the channels, the turn has now come to channels. We look at how you can use channels to set the resolution as well as bit depth and why you should care about the color vs the scalar checkbox. We also look at ways to import paint into channels using channel presets. And when you thought nothing more could be added we also looked at ways to export paint using channels and a quick peek into the channels when using the node graph. All of this using the free Mari non-commercial, so you can follow along, even if you do not have a paid version of Mari

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