Tuesday, February 11, 2014

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




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 NetoMiguel 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.