Previewing a new Material Presets Manager for mGo! - The Materialiser

Create a golden head, just like that

It's been too long between updates. Things have been really busy lately and I've needed some rest, but I'm at the point where I'm ready to jump into it again. Looking over the blog I realize it's deviated a bit from the original intention- which was talking about materials and shading networks and building up a resource of techniques- and has instead become a kind of dev blog for the couple of python projects I am involved with. I'm not sure what to do about that just yet.

Today though, I will atleast try to merge those two things by previewing a new feature to mGo!, which I've dubbed 'The Materialiser'. This new functionality will allow you to save and load material presets from inside Mari, and of course is designed to work with Antonio's production based OpenGl shaders. When importing a preset, the script will read the shader type and from there a new shader will be created and every attribute set. In this way you can quickly get up and running with materials in Mari by having quick and easy access to these presets. When saving, you'll be able to sort your custom materials within categories, based on shader type or whatever you wish, and we'll include a bunch of presets with the release.

A feature which could potentially really help Mari artists is an RGB values to New Channel feature, which I've been trialing the past couple of days. This would take any attributes in the material preset which were represented as RGB values, eg- the specular colour of a gold material or the gloss value for a matt plastic, and recreate those values inside new channels by adding a constant colour layer inside of them. From there, the new layer would serve as a reference or guide - you'd have a base colour or greyscale value to work from as you built up textural variety around those values. It seems like this would be quite useful.

While I'm working on this stuff, Antonio is putting the finishing touches on a new system which will allow blended shader and falloff shader support in mGo! We'll transfer this system over to the Materialiser soon, so you'll be able to easily load up a 'carpaint with decals' blended shader preset if you wanted- and output the whole network directly to Maya once textured. Lots of interesting potential there.

Mari Custom Shaders Project Update

mGo! Exporter

We've recieved a lot of great feedback from Mari users about the Custom Shaders project. If you haven't caught up on the latest videos, Antonio has posted to Vimeo some demonstrations here, here, and here. Needless to say, we'll be pushing things further with new ideas- we're passionate about the project and are looking forward to seeing things evolve.

For now, I'd just like to go through a couple current features of the exporter, which haven't been covered in the videos. First to mention is that the exporter supports shader connections to Maya linked to multiple objects. So for example- if you have a head object, and then some eyes as a separate object in Mari, you can export textures and shader attributes for the head, and then the eyes, and update those shaders and textures specific to each of those objects whenever you want in a back and forth manner.

Second (and this is obviously a small feature) is the texture filter options menu in the Mari exporter UI. This lets you select amongst a small set of options related to the filter settings in Maya's filenode. The default setting 'Quadratic' blurs textures heavily and it's a pet peeve of mine to always go into that setting and turn filtering to 'Off'. 'Quadratic' and 'Off' plus another option, 'Animation' (Quadratic filtering with a reduced filter of .1 from the default 1) are the three available choices for now.

Preview of 'Mari Go!' - And some Good News about LookDev in Mari

Preview of 'Mari Go!'

The Mari to Maya bridge is coming along and recently there have been some exciting developments which have impacted the project in a positive way, allowing it to be a much more useful tool than I'd originally planned. It's now being integrated into a larger project with a bigger vision- the central idea or tool being the development of some fantastic new custom shaders for Mari. These shaders are being designed (by Antonio Neto, Miguel A Santiago Jr and Nicholas Breslow) as accurate representations of existing architectural/monolithic shaders used in various 3d renderers, such as Arnold, Vray and Mental Ray, and will allow artists working in Mari to get a much better sense of how their texture maps are going to look in render.

mia_material replicated in Mari (by Nicholas Breslow)

Once the user is happy with how things are looking inside Mari, all textures and shader parameters set within the custom shader will translate 1:1 over to Maya/Softimage, enabling a very quick and simple way to get texture assets out of Mari and into your 3d package, ready for a test render.

Check out the 'Mari Custom Shaders' project on the Paintmore forum, here.