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.