Earlier this year leading up to NAB, The Foundry announced their new texture painting application Mari. Mari began as a tool used by Weta Digital after completing King Kong and was used in award winning visual effects films like Avatar and District 9 before making its way over to The Foundry for commercial release.
Given its history as a proprietary tool by Weta, Mari wasn’t designed in a theoretical vacuum; the overall direction of Mari was tuned specifically to the needs of the production of Avatar and features were requested, prioritized and hammered on by artists in real production time. One of the goals for Mari was to develop an application that can create and load incredibly high resolution textures for detailed models and remain responsive regardless of the scalability. Another thing that sets Mari apart is the philosophy that textures should be painted in the context of the scenes and shots they will ultimately end up in, including the animation of the models a texture artist is working on.
Mari is able to handle 32K-resolution textures (over 1 million pixels) with multiple channels or thousands of smaller textures, in either full floating point, 16-bit or 8-bit color depth on models with over 20 million polygons. This rather obscene amount of resolution lets artists get as detailed as they want by loading detail in the textures dynamically as they work. This kind of resolution does have its cost—system requirements demand fairly cutting edge systems with high-end NVIDIA Quadro workstation cards with at least 1GB of memory onboard. Be prepared to hand as much as 250GB of hard drive space to Mari for caching and temporary files too. For those who can afford that kind of system, however, the freedom is stunning.
One thing to note is that AMD’s workstation line of cards with similar specs should work with Mari. However, with the lack of FirePro cards being used in high-end VFX production facilities, The Foundry hasn’t done thorough testing with them yet. We plan to do some testing of our own with the FirePro cards and see how they handle the job.
All the normal texturing tools you’d expect from competing 3D texture painting applications exist in Mari; a fully customizable brush engine, cloning and healing brushes, filters, blur and the ability to paint across multiple channels and textures. Mari also packs some serious image warping tools to give you control and flexibility when projecting textures onto a model. Mari’s painting is done with a projection system that takes the texture management out of the hands of the artist and lets them focus on painting. Under the surface, however, Mari is doing a lot of complex database work to handle all of this management so that the user doesn’t have to.
As I mentioned earlier, Mari allows you to load full animations for a model so that you can always see how a texture will look when distorted in motion. This is a big deal because artists can work at a shot level with the texture dynamically instead of finding problems later at render time and having to go back and correct for any issues. I believe this feature also makes Mari a great choice for texture artists working on games with a limited set of motion cycles that a character will more-or-less always be locked into.
Ryan Wilsey and I got to sit down with Jack Greasley, the Mari Product Manager and Lucy Cooper, head of marketing at The Foundry at SIGGRAPH last week and talked about many of the general details of Mari as well as the direction for the future.
The big announcement at SIGGRAPH was The Foundry’s agreement with Walt Disney Animation Studios to bring their infamous proprietary Paint 3D texturing technology into Mari. Paint 3D is the painting tool that was developed along with Disney’s now open source Ptex file format and API for doing texturing without explicit UVs and adaptive resolution seamlessly. We plan to write further about Ptex in the future, but suffice to say it’s very cool technology and you’ve probably seen it in action on Disney’s 2008 animated feature Bolt as well as any of their more recent 3D animations. While Ptex is open source, getting access to Disney’s own 3D texturing tools that were developed around Ptex is a major move to integrate two different production-proven texturing tools from different studios and workflows.
Mari is initially being targeted at high-end visual effects facilities but will encompass more of the 3D community as the application continues to be developed. Jack and Lucy discussed Mari for game studios with us briefly and it’s a market they are interested in—however, with The Foundry’s background in tools for film and video they are still working on discovering how Mari could best fit into a game production pipeline.
I believe we’ll see a lot more interest from the game production community as quality in game engines continue to converge with the higher resolution standards for film. This will become even more prevalent as more film studios pass their assets to game developers for creating movie and game tie-ins with the same base assets. With more detail ending up in displacement and normal maps wrapped around relatively low resolution subdivision models it’s easy to speculate that in the future the same base models for film could also be the base model used in a related game. A tool like Mari can be used to generate multi-resolution textures to be output for both mediums and would simplify that pipeline as the synergy between film and game studios grow. Pre-rendered cinematics are also another part of game production where Mari’s high-resolution texturing would work well in a gaming pipeline.
Mari is currently only available for Linux but a Windows release is expected sometime this year. I’m extremely excited to get my hands on Mari and see what it is capable of for myself. We will be covering Mari in greater detail here in the future—it’s a remarkable application to have joining the market. With a foundation from Weta, technology from Disney Animation Studios and further development in the capable and proven hands of The Foundry I have no doubt that Mari will become a strong contender in the high-end 3D application market.
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