Tutorial: Creating Production-Ready Hero Assets Using Mari
The Gnomon Workshop has released Creating Production-Ready Hero Assets Using Mari, a guide to professional asset development workflows, recorded by VFX artist Michal Zsigsimund.
The workshop, which is aimed at intermediate-to-advanced artists, provides four hours of video training in Maya, texturing software Mari, and open-source lighting and look dev tool Gaffer.
Master current professional asset development workflows for VFX
In the workshop, Zsigismund explores how to use Mari and Gaffer to develop photorealistic hero assets suitable for use in production for film and broadcast VFX.
He begins by discussing how to use Mari and the third-party Mari Extension Pack to create detailed textures, including how to use the Extension Pack’s Smart Mask system.
Zsigismund then sets out how to export a mesh from Maya using the Alembic file format before diving into Mari’s The Bakery, Mari’s texture baking system, introduced in Mari 7.0.
He then creates diffuse, roughness and bump maps in Mari, revealing the techniques that he uses in production, including how to create secondary high-frequency bump details.
Once texturing is complete, Zsigismund exports the textures and begins building out the scene in Gaffer, breaking down what each node does, and how it fits into a studio pipeline.
About the artist
Michal Zsigmund is a Freelance CG Generalist and lookdev artist, with over 10 years of experience at leading international VFX studios including Framestore and Rise.
Movies he has worked on include Deadpool, Wolverine, The Matrix Resurrections, Uncharted, and Wonka.
Pricing and availability
Creating Production-Ready Hero Assets Using Mari is available via a subscription to The Gnomon Workshop, which provides access to over 300 tutorials.
Subscriptions cost $57/month or $519/year. Free trials are available.
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