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.
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| 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.
