The Foundry releases MARI 1.5

At SIGGRAPH in LA, The Foundry announced they have released MARI 1.5, with new overlapping UV support, Maya texture export, and mirroring in the paint buffer. We’ll be covering the release in more detail, including an interview with product manager Jack Greasley and information from tonight’s Geek Fest. But in the meantime, here’s the full press release from The Foundry.


MARI 1.5 LAUNCHES AT SIGGRAPH 2012 – BRAND NEW CREATIVE FEATURES AND ENHANCEMENTS FOR HIGH END VFX IN THE GAMES INDUSTRY

Maya texture export

THE FUTURE OF GAMING
London, 6th August 2012 – Leading visual effects software developer, The Foundry, has released MARI 1.5, packed with new features that reach beyond the film industry and will appeal to the games market.

MARI is a production proven 3D digital paint tool, designed from the ground up so artists can spend more time being creative and less time managing technical issues.

LucasArts has already been using MARI 1.5 in production as one of its texturing tools on the highly anticipated award-winning Star Wars 1313TM video game. MARI was adopted by the legendary games developer specifically to deal with the vast numbers of textures within the game environment.


Overlapping UVs

Kim Libreri, Visual Effects Supervisor, Industrial Light & Magic/LucasArts comments:
“Integrating MARI at LucasArts for Star Wars 1313 helped us work a lot more efficiently and contributed to making the game visually stunning. MARI allows us to create more realistic assets using techniques similar to those we use at ILM for our movies. It’s also been a real benefit that the texture artists are able to preview assets in real-time so they can interact with them and see exactly how they are going to look in-game.”

Jack Greasley, MARI Product Manager at The Foundry comments: “Mari 1.5 is the result of close collaboration between The Foundry and our customers. We believe that Mari 1.5 is the most exciting texture painting and 3D digital paint tool available and that it addresses the needs of not just VFX and CG but anyone who needs to put pixels onto polygons.”

WHAT’S NEW?

Mirroring in the paint buffer

This release of MARI adds even more creative functionality into the mix. These features make it even easier for games developers to utilise MARIs capabilities as well as enhancing the experience of artists working in all sectors of high-end visual effects.

As well as the addition of games shaders, improved Overlapping UV Support gives artists the freedom of a smooth and robust workflow allowing shared textures to be re-used across 3D models within the same UV space.

Helping to improve interoperability with Autodesk® Maya®, artists can now seamlessly handle patch based textures with a single click using the new Maya Texture Export feature. Shadow Support lets artists cast real-time shadows on objects from multiple light sources. This brand new functionality allows users to effortlessly see the impact of dramatic lighting on their textures.

DDS Cubemap Support means artists can accurately match the final look of real time assets, and new Mirroring Support in MARI’s paint buffer has been added so MARI users can get results fast and take control of symmetrical objects at any stage of the creative process.

4 thoughts on “The Foundry releases MARI 1.5”

    1. John Montgomery

      First off — it would be great if The Foundry was easily able to support AMD, but I do know from being in on the dev process on other applications that NVIDIA cards can be way more robust for content creation type applications. I’m not talking about CUDA or OpenCL here, but simply managing large data sets and textures…getting them not just on the card, but also off the card. And if you look at it…MARI is doing some serious work with texture maps. But what do I know?

      So I did drop by The Foundry booth to follow up with Jack Greasley about it. While the ATI cards still aren’t certified, recent driver improvements by AMD have started to change the landscape. Try out current recent cards with the recent drivers….and you may be pleasantly surprised. Still not officially certified, but what about certification? It’s definitely on the radar. The Foundry have been working very closely with AMD recently to get things working on the hardware and driver front. This isn’t idle talk — we really can’t say more — but The Foundry are definitely serious about getting AMD cards into the mix. It’s just not as simple as it seems when you’re doing the type of crazy stuff they’re doing with hires imagery.

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