Friday, June 12th, 2015 Posted by Jim Thacker

Download the free Mari Extension Pack 2.1

Originally posted on 28 January 2015. Scroll down for details of the 2.1 update.

Former Weta Digital and Animal Logic texture artist Jens Kafitz has just posted Mari Extension Pack 2.0: an updated and renamed version of last year’s free Ideascale Nodepack.

A set of nearly 70 bonus features for the 3D painting software, the pack has been created by artists throughout the Mari community, and is released under a BSD licence, making it possible to use in commercial work.

New texture-bombing node and texture projection system
Eye-catchers this time round include Texture Scatter 2D: a texture-bombing node capable of creating seamless textures up to 32K in resolution, plus new procedurals Backface Mask and the brilliantly named VoronoiPopcorn.

There is also a new Axis Projection system: think an amped-up version of Triplanar Projection with more controls over how a projected texture is oriented on the geometry.

However, there are also a lot of nice little time-savers, particularly for working with channels and layers, including the option to duplicate and merge them in a single operation; and support for custom channel resolutions.

The online documentation is thorough, too, so you shouldn’t need to do much trial-and-error experimentation.

Updated 12 June: A new update, Mari Extension Pack 2.1, is now available.

New features include Unreal Advanced, a new BRDF shader compatible with UE4. It has the neat property of automatically flashing a warning if you’re painting values that would break physically based shading.

There is also an option to freeze the viewport when performing intensive operations like reordering layers, to avoid having to wait for the viewport to update with each change.

Other additions include a fairly self-explanatory Selection Fill node; a Color Temperature adjustment layer for people who like to use Kelvin values; and a new Edge from Normal Map node for improved curvature detection.

Mari Extension Pack 2.1 is a free download. You’ll need to be running Mari 2.6v3 or higher.

Read a full list of features in Mari Extension Pack 2.0

Read a full list of features in Mari Extension Pack 2.1

Download Mari Extension Pack 2.1