The Foundry builds new Mari-to-Nuke bridge
The Foundry has released a new update to Mari, its 3D painting package, improving integration with Nuke.
The rather convolutedly titled Mari 1.3v2 (why not just Mari 1.4?) enables artists to transfer assets between the two apps in a single step, speeding up matte painting and clean-up.
The update reinforces one of Mari’s original strengths: during its development at Weta, the app was used to paint fixes in rendered sequences, as well as to texture static models.
PRESS RELEASE (Excerpts)
Leading visual effects software developer The Foundry today announced the latest version of its creative paint and texture tool – MARI 1.3 v2.
Now shipping, MARI 1.3v2 delivers a focused workflow to provide NUKE artists with dedicated 3D paint tools, that make digital environment and projection work more efficient and final composited scenes more believable. The new NUKEMARI bridge creates an intuitive workflow between two of The Foundry’s leading visual effects software products.
MARI offers the best possible interface and toolset for creating and editing 3D textures. NUKE artists can now access the benefits of MARI the moment they need dedicated paint tools, keeping context of the models, cameras and projections in their compositing scene. By bridging the two toolsets artists immediately benefit from applying the most appropriate tools to the task. This frees them to concentrate on creative and accurate work and removes the pain of manual round-trip and data management, which is now automatically handled for them in the background.
“A NUKE, MARI combination workflow is saving me 20% to 30% of my time creating clean plates” said Brandon Fayette, CG Supervisor and production lead, Bad Robot. “I’ve already completed 14 shots this way and I am really happy with the results.” Brandon has been using a similar workflow for matte paintings: “Combining compositing, 3D modelling and texture painting in the same workflow is just amazing.”
Benefits of the NUKEMARI bridge include:
- Simple to set up, quick and easy to use
Models, projections and images are sent from NUKE to MARI and back in a single step, or over a network when artists need to collaborate, share skills or save time.
- Better integration of digital environments and matte paintings
Artists can address common and time-consuming challenges faced when using projection techniques to build digital environments:
– Manage reference photography and paint seamless 3D projections
– Easily fix warping and stretching artefacts
– In-paint holes and occluded areas, often exposed from adjusted camera views
– Remove unwanted markers and scene objects
– Build invisible set-extensions
- Access to the full NUKE and MARI toolset, each dedicated to the task
Gives the artists the best tools and workflow combined, to achieve the best quality results in the shortest time