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View Full Version : Mari 1.3 - Displacement. PTex. Snapshots.

forelle
05-31-2011, 01:45 PM
Hello,

We've been a bit quiet in Mari world recently as we've been heads down and coding like crazy for Mari 1.3. This new version adds some really cool work flow features and a whole bunch of optimizations and fixes.

Grab more information here ...

http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/articles/2011/05/31/243/mari-13-is-now-available/

As always please let me know if you have any questions

Coming Sooon.....

Nuke / Mari workflow for environment and matte painting work.

http://www.youtube.com/user/TheFoundryChannel#p/u/1/fMLLvmsl8Is

This should be out by the end of the month.

Displacement Preview

Mari 1.2 and earlier uses bump mapping to display displacement. This is cool, but really what you want is triangles. Lots of triangles. Billions of triangles.

Mari 1.3 uses the power of DX11 class GPUs to dynamically tessellate and displace your models. Because the tessellation happens on the fly based on the camera location, you're pretty much unlimited in the amount of detail you can display.

Here is a quick screen of the trusty TRex model. This is displayed using real displacement, all of the scales and other detail is triangular data. There are 260, 2k displacement maps. At 2 triangles per pixel this works out to 2.2 billion polygons of data.

http://img192.imageshack.us/img192/8035/dinonozoom.png (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/192/dinonozoom.png/)

And a quick zoom in shows some triangles. The thicker lines are the original geometry.

http://img98.imageshack.us/img98/5159/dinozoomed.th.png (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/98/dinozoomed.png/)
(Click to zoom)

PTex

http://ptex.us/ptex-teaser.png

Mari 1.3 supports a full PTex workflow with UV-less painting supported up to 8k x 8k per face. Mari's PTex integration is built on the same stupidly powerful data engine as the rest of Mari, giving you almost entirely unlimited amounts of detail without having to create a single UV map.

8/16/32bit per component, per face resizing, Python PTex API and support for embedded geometry and metadata within PTex files means Mari plays very nicely with other applications and renderers in your pipeline.

Snapshots

http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/media/dpics/2011/05/27/3415.jpg

By giving the the artist a simple, but hugely powerful versioning system, snapshots give unprecedented flexibility to deal with change and variation. Mari's snapshot system can instantly version thousands of textures, even with multi-gigbyte data sets. Artists can play with new ideas, provide multiple variations and manage them seamlessly and easily. Creating versions is instant and fluid, so no more waiting for files to copy or overwriting the wrong files. Change requests become a pleasure and not a drag.

Other stuff

Tiled textures, environment mapping, more Python API, new project explorer popup. Lots of good stuff. See the release notes for a full list.
Ballo
05-31-2011, 01:54 PM
Amazing! I was wondering just how texturers paint if they don't see the final model! Good news.

Thanks.
DrSrsen
05-31-2011, 04:59 PM
Massive release, can't wait!
csutcliffe
05-31-2011, 05:24 PM
still no support for ATI cards which is a shame!
DrSrsen
05-31-2011, 05:44 PM
Y'know what would be swell?

Student licenses
oglu
05-31-2011, 08:00 PM
gratulation to the release...!
punchatz
05-31-2011, 08:42 PM
Looks like the price jumped x2 or more in this release. Seems to me its going to really slow down/ stop in adoption of MARI. I was going to jump on the MARI train soon, but the new price point makes it very painful.
Kinematics
06-01-2011, 03:40 AM
Hey guys, when I first heard about Mari, what I really was excited about was the idea that we could paint across multiple 4k or 8k textures.

My question is where is the best place to learn about the workflow between Maya & Mari including the UV process and keeping in mind production needs such as rigging.

I would like to assign multiple 8k texture maps to a single mesh. During the online competition, it sure seemed like people were mostly using 1 texture map per object and Mari just kept things a little more efficient.

Is there a proper tutorial out there to connect multiple textures to one mesh. I've seen how people do it, roughly, but it looks complicated. Is it really that complicated?
MasonDoran
06-01-2011, 08:27 AM
Yes, you stack the textures in a chain using the default color of the file node, and then turn off the wrap in the 2dplacement node, and then offset the UV space to match the UV tile. The same workflow is done using Mudbox, which there are plenty of tutorials.

Be prepared for Maya Hypershade to crash Maya once you have a dozen 8k textures maps all stacked though. You would think Autodesk would know about this issue, but apparently not until recently.
MasonDoran
06-01-2011, 08:29 AM
Looks like the price jumped x2 or more in this release. Seems to me its going to really slow down/ stop in adoption of MARI. I was going to jump on the MARI train soon, but the new price point makes it very painful.


If you were on the newsletter, you would have recieved an email stating the deadline before the price hike just before 1.3 was released.
forelle
06-01-2011, 08:38 AM
I would like to assign multiple 8k texture maps to a single mesh. During the online competition, it sure seemed like people were mostly using 1 texture map per object and Mari just kept things a little more efficient.



If you check out the winning entry by Chris Welch (Aquafat), he provided an example Maya scene that he used to render his entry with. Most of the entries used multiple patches, I think there were 30+ patches on the body alone (if I remember correctly)
molman
06-01-2011, 09:41 AM
Hey guys, when I first heard about Mari, what I really was excited about was the idea that we could paint across multiple 4k or 8k textures.

My question is where is the best place to learn about the workflow between Maya & Mari including the UV process and keeping in mind production needs such as rigging.

I would like to assign multiple 8k texture maps to a single mesh. During the online competition, it sure seemed like people were mostly using 1 texture map per object and Mari just kept things a little more efficient.

Is there a proper tutorial out there to connect multiple textures to one mesh. I've seen how people do it, roughly, but it looks complicated. Is it really that complicated?

http://www.digitaltutors.com/11/video_player.php?id=513

This tutorial was very helpful! Try it out.
AdrianLazar
06-01-2011, 10:36 AM
Hopefully an OS X version is not far away!
Looks great!
forelle
06-01-2011, 10:56 AM
Can someone answer a quick question for me?

Can you both load and save PTex in Mudbox 2012 or is it save only?

Edit: Found out that you can. Cool.
mustique
06-01-2011, 11:26 AM
http://www.digitaltutors.com/11/video_player.php?id=513

This tutorial was very helpful! Try it out.

This is good to watch to understand the logic/process. Of course a script/tool that automates this stuff is vital. The Ptex way is much more elegant if your renderer supports it.
E_Moelzer
06-01-2011, 11:31 AM
Anyone know where I can see the current pricing for the Foundry products?
I have been unable to find them on the website or at the resellers.
oglu
06-01-2011, 11:40 AM
there is a mel script for mudbox files... just rename the UDIM to mudbox tiles and have fun...
http://www.pixelcg.com/blog/?p=88

and one for softimage...
http://dynamiclens.com/wordpress/?page_id=136
forelle
06-01-2011, 11:41 AM
there is a mel script for mudbox files... just rename the UDIM to mudbox tiles and have fun...
http://www.pixelcg.com/blog/?p=88

We also have some example python scripts knocking about that export from Mari in Mudbox naming convention.

This does make it more difficult to run your textures through your favorite compositing package as the file names no longer form a sequence.... ;)
forelle
06-01-2011, 12:42 PM
Anyone know where I can see the current pricing for the Foundry products?
I have been unable to find them on the website or at the resellers.

If you click through the "Buy" button on the product page you can find the price in GBP, USD and EUR.

http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/cart/item.php?product_id=850
beaker
06-01-2011, 06:12 PM
Be prepared for Maya Hypershade to crash Maya once you have a dozen 8k textures maps all stacked though. You would think Autodesk would know about this issue, but apparently not until recently.If you use mipmapped textures like .map for MR then this shouldn't be much of an issue. Maya will only use the proper resolution size you need at the time of render depending on the distance from camera.
E_Moelzer
06-01-2011, 06:58 PM
Mah, I did not see the buy Button! :blush:
Thanks, feeling really stupid now! Gotta go and get some sleep I guess ;)
forelle
06-02-2011, 08:48 AM
Oh, and for those people that haven't seen it. We're working on a Mari / Nuke work flow for environment work and matte painting. Should be out by the end of June.

http://www.youtube.com/user/TheFoundryChannel#p/u/1/fMLLvmsl8Is
MasonDoran
06-03-2011, 09:34 PM
If you use mipmapped textures like .map for MR then this shouldn't be much of an issue. Maya will only use the proper resolution size you need at the time of render depending on the distance from camera.

I dont, simply because as a texture artist building the shaders, using .map just gets in the way of communicating with Mari and Maya as I tweak and re-import textures every few minutes.

I use the auto convert to .map for rendering, but this doesnt effect the hypershade.


Only solutions is actually using a mel script to disable the swatch generation. I dont need the swatches anyways...the are not accurate enough to the final result.
forelle
06-14-2011, 04:14 PM
Hi,

We've just uploaded some Mari 1.3 feature introduction videos to our YouTube channel.

Have a look if you're interested in the new stuff in the latest release.

General 1.3 Intro (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyWEJW5mNME)
Displacement Preview (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kICffvKRmm4)
PTex (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pBYbBEs0MQ)
Snapshots (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47TbjNx5v3A)
Tiled Textures (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIAPLhucX10)
Environment mapping (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogTBP7qogFc)

As always, please fire away with any questions.
arvindsond
07-17-2011, 04:43 PM
Yeah Mari 1.3 really exciting to see it progressing quickly with the updates, but still cant believe theres no ATI support, when ATI have some decent cards, sometimes the benchmarks beat nvidia's, at least release a beta driver so users can give it a whirl on a 15 day trial.

Arvind!
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