Mari from The Foundry & Weta Digital

The Foundry will show for the first time at NAB 2010 in Las Vegas new products including the acquisition of Weta's Paint and texturing program Mari.

Mari is a new product for the Foundry, developed by the R&D and texture departments at Weta Digital. Mari has been forged by Weta in the heat of the production of films such as Lord of The Rings, King Kong and Avatar. Mari is a full 3D paint/texture tool able to handle up to 30K textures and produce production ready assets while remaining responsive and interactive. The product is not a modeling tool such as Mudbox - rather it is focused just on texture painting.

The application allows hundreds of production textures to be painted on a model, but rather than be limited to just a static neutral pose, you can import an animation sequence and still interactively work on the texturing. This is important as seams and stretching can often only appear when the character or asset is in motion in a real scene, which is exactly why Mari has this feature - it is a direct result of Production requests from the original Weta team.

One of the programs strongest features is its interactivity. Even with real world production models of high complexity, with multiple 2K textures - the program is lightning fast and responsive. Through the use of some GUI and some very smart CPU programing, the engineering team has produced an extraordinarily interactive program.

To aid in workflow - multiple models can be imported and either models or parts of a master model can be hidden, allowing painting behind the asset and into tight joints and textural creases.

* interactively handles very large 3D model data sets, scaling to over 1 million polygons
* supports large textures, up to 32K x 32K pixels (normally, single textures never need to be this large)
* handles hundreds and thousands of textures per model, over many layers
* provides single- or multi- patch UV texture map management
* supports multiple models or model instances in a single scene
* handles animated geometry and animated textures - floating point, 16-bit or 8-bit textures

In all, this means Mari is happy managing over 100 gigabyte geometry and texture data sets on a single model without slowing down artist interaction and workflow. High performance is achieved with modest hardware requirements (2-4 gigabyte system memory, .5-1 gigabyte graphics memory), with Mari automatically making efficient use of available resources and background task processes.

Mari will go into Beta soon and is expected to be in the order of around 500 euros, but no actual pricing has been officially announced.

via: fxguide

• http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/