Foundry releases Mari 7.5
Originally posted on 15 September for the public beta, and updated for the stable release.
Foundry has released Mari 7.5, the next version of its 3D texture painting software.
The release adds a much-requested feature: Multi-Paint – the option to paint into multiple texture channels simultaneously, rather than having to paint each texture map separately.
Other changes include a new Texture Transfer system to streamline texture baking, updates to automatic backups, and new bundled stock textures from Texturing XYZ
New Multi-Paint system lets you paint multiple texture maps simultaneously
The main change in Mari 7.5 is the new Multi-Paint system, developed in partnership with Wētā FX.
In the past, Mari’s painting toolset was limited to using a single RGBA image, making it impossible to paint other textures, like specular or bump, at the same time as the diffuse map.
Multi-Paint enables artists to paint or project images into up to eight different channels, making it possible to paint multiple textures maps simultaneously.
A new Multi-Channel Painting interface lets users select which channels to paint into, to drag and drop in the images through which to paint, and to set their blending modes.
Any paint operations are then performed on all of the channels at once.
All of Mari’s paint buffer tools work with Multi-Paint, with many key tools – including Paint, Paint Buffer Eraser, Blur, Warp, Slerp and Clone Stamp – updated to support the workflow.
Users can also save Multi-Paint channel setups to reuse on other projects, or to share with colleagues.
Create groups in the Image Manager and drag them into the Multi-Paint palette
Mari 7.5 also reworks the Image Manager to support image groups instead of the existing tabs.
The change makes it possible to create a group of images and drag them into the new Multi-Paint palette, where Mari will make an ‘educated guess’ on which channels to assign them to.
For more complex set-ups, users can assign a shader model to a group, and specify which image to assign to which stream manually.
Improvements to The Bakery and automatic back-ups
The Bakery, the new texture-baking engine rolled out in Mari 7.0, gets a Texture Transfer system.
It is intended to streamline the process of transferring textures and node graphs between objects with different UV layouts.
Users can have Mari handle the UV coordinate mapping between source and destination objects automatically, or can guide the process with a manually generated UV map.
The project recovery and backup management system has also been updated, with new options for tagging backups, and reduced loading times when loading projects from backups.
Mari 7.5 also ships with three new animal maps and 54 new skins from asset library Texturing XYZ, and new brushes from look dev artist Bradford deCaussin.
Still on the CY2023 spec for the VFX Reference Platform
Mari 7.5 remains on the CY2023 specification for VFX Reference Platform, three versions behind the latest spec, but there have been minor updates to some libraries since the previous release, Mari 7.1.
Price, system requirements and release date
Mari 7.5 is compatible with Windows 11 and Rocky Linux/RHEL 9.
Mari is available rental-only. Individual subscriptions have a standard price of $86/month, or $689/year. Subscriptions for teams cost $1,229/year, up $60/year since the release of Mari 7.1.
Read an overview of the new features in Mari 7.5 on Foundry’s website
Read a full list of new features in Mari 7.5 in the online release notes
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