Mari Updates Archives - Meshmen studio

Mari 7 Update | Rocking new features!

meshAdmin — Sun, 17 Mar 2024 19:34:38 +0000

Mari 7 just got its first patch release, and what usually is a bugfix, we got some nice improvements bundled in the form of a new limit for blurring textures and a new blur node completely. We also got a major overhaul in the amount of polygons that the new bakery can handle, previously resulting in artefacts when baked

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New in Mari 7 | Gloves on against Substance

meshAdmin — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 17:55:46 +0000

Mari 7 is now out, we now see a new Bakery implemented, to bake out texture passes for the material system. We can now on the GPU bake Ambient Occlusion, Thickness, and Curvature. There were also updates to the USD loader as well as many node graph improvements, On the pipeline side we see a new Auto backup system, developed in collaboration with Weta. We also see new Shaders as well as Full Mari extension support from the get-go.

The Initial Comparison of bake speed where I took the same asset in both Substance Painter and went head to head in Mari was quite impressive.

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The radio is dead, long live the broadcaster

meshAdmin — Sun, 12 Mar 2023 18:16:46 +0000

Quite a few years ago now I made a feature request with Foundry and also a video on the Youtube channel, where I was talking about something I used to use back in the day in Renderman and SLIM.

The concept was broadcasters and receivers nodes. The idea was to create something similar for Mari as working with Nodes can be quite disorienting and result in what I call Mari spaghettification.

You can get spaghettification if you share the same nodes in multiple places.

Node connections go all over the place, I wanted specialized nodes to help declutter the Node graph.
The idea was to introduce a node handling broadcasting, you would basically declare a name and using a specialized receiver node you could, wherever you were in a graph listen to this variable and pick it up.

Basically, you could have noodles connecting to multiple places and hide the number of connecting noodles.

Here is the original Youtube video where I pitched the idea to Foundry for my feature request.

As we all know developing software takes time and I was not expecting this to happen overnight.

Luckily Jens Kafits from Mari extension pack Jumped on the idea and within a few weeks I was already testing the first version of what later came to be known as the radio nodes in Mari extension pack.

I Thought problem solved let’s move along,

But one thing was always nagging me when I created Youtube videos for the community.
I end up using workflows that I personally have acquired throughout my now over 20 years career within VFX and texturing / Lookdev.

I got questions like where I find the radio nodes?
coming from artists wanting to learn Mari and I constantly have to say.

You need extension pack to do this!

It’s not great from a learning perspective, as I do want to teach artists the workflows I expect them to know If I would hire them.

I guess this also boils down to the current barrier in Mari where we don’t really have an indie version to practice/ learn.

Sure you have Mari non-commercial but It’s quite limited and does not support the loading of plugins.

Anyone using Mari would know if you are used to using Mari and the extension pack, it’s quite obvious when you don’t have the extension pack.
Most of the workflows we take for granted are just not working!

Now back to the main subject!

I’m now happy to announce to all artists!
At least I don’t have to say, you need the extension pack to do this!

This is cause we recently saw the introduction of native Broadcaster nodes in Mari.
To some extent, the new broadcasters are even more powerful than Jens radio system as they now also natively take away the barrier the radio nodes did have.
The radio system only works on the same level of the node graph!

here is a Video where I dissect the new broadcasters more in-depth

The radio is almost dead!

Now before I end. Something that was actually working in the radio systems’ favor when building materials was the fact it did not work cross-node graph levels!

Let me explain.

If I build materials and set up templates, where I define names broadcasted within the material, I only want them to work locally.
As otherwise I need to define unique names for each material and that would contradict making templates in the first place.

I already filed a ticket to be able to localize broadcasters and until that happens I will continue to use radio nodes within Mari materials.

Hopefully, this will not take as long as I had to wait for the broadcasters to become native in Mari!

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New features in Mari 6

meshAdmin — Sat, 11 Mar 2023 20:31:28 +0000

Mari 6 introduced a number of USD updates and new features. We can now export USD to other DCCs. Mari will assign to selection groups as well as export and convert textures to a render-friendly format.

We also see a new roller brush that makes it easier to roll out tiled textures onto the objects. YOu can use it for patterns like stitches or whatever else that makes sense as a tiled texture.

Another “new” or should I say old feature is the broadcaster nodes that we saw introduced in Mari 4.8 and 5. As this feature was intended as a Mari 6 feature its now also launched as a new feature in mari 6. I guess Foundry was friendly enough to backport it to all of us stuck in old pipelines.

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New Features in Mari 5 you should know about!

meshAdmin — Tue, 26 Oct 2021 20:32:29 +0000

Mari 5 is in open beta and it ships with a number of really powerful new features. We seen features like initial USD support, a new USD preview shader as well as the ability to export USD looks to software like Katana, Or hydra based viewports.

Foundry also made improvements to baking speed and this was achieved in collaboration with Weta. I saw speed increases in baking on a 276 UDIM asset in 4k from 3min bake in Mari 4.7 to just above 1 minute in Mari 5. This will on large scale assets on complex networks or channels means a lot of artist time saved in the end.

An old feature request of mine also now saw the light of day in the form of filter bake points, this will help maintain non-linear filter operations in the node graph and will open up workflows not easily possible before.

Node graph also saw improvements where we now have a grid and snapping to the grid. As Well as we can also now tweak the grid background color, not sure why you would do this but hey! That’s cool I guess.

There was also a number of new gradient nodes that will open up more powerful procedural techniques using gradients between locators or objects in the scene. I hope the locator workflow is expanded on in the future as the current locator implementation is clunky at best.

Mari 5 also gets open-colour 2.0 added, its a welcome addition for your VFX pipeline.

All in all its an interesting update and I’m exited to see where the USD workflow will take us next

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