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.