The shader inside MARI controls the displaying of the model on the canvas. The default shader shows the colour from the current channel this basically don’t means the shader would affect the content of the channel but only the way how MARI display it. You can build your own custom shaders by combining shader modules. Each module controls a single display effect. The modules you can use include:
- Combining two diffuse channels
- Showing a channel as a displacement map
- Using a channel as a luminosity map
- Combining channels using a third channel as a mask.
System Requirements
- Quad-core processor
- Windows 7 64-bit, or a Linux 64-bit operating system (Fedora 12 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4)
- 250GB disk space available for caching and temporary
- At least 4GB RAM
Supported Graphics Cards
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480*
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580*
- NVIDIA Quadro FX 3800
- NVIDIA Quadro FX 3800M
- NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800
MARI vs Photoshop
The difference between these two applications is to see on the first look, one is used as a 3D digital painting tool and the other as 2D digital painting tool. Even that booth can handle with their features one or the other; it is possible to replace one of them with the other? Adobes Photoshop is on the tron of image-editing in the world for many years and almost without any straight competitor in the industry. 3D-World Magazine published an article about this issue „Do you really need Photoshop?“ including comments from a number of major London studios and found that the answer is „yes“ but not necessarily in the way you might think.
We could drop things and build [a direct competitor to Photoshop] tomorrow, but I think it would be a mistake,” he continued. “Photoshop is a very tough target because it’s so pervasive. It’s on so many desks in so many industries, and has such a long history.
If the VFX industry will abandon Adobes software solutions we will see in the future but if we look on the way how this works now it’s more than unthinkable. On the market for CG industry is more than dozen applications for 3D modelling, rendering and so on and even that no one can tell that one is directly for this and the other for something else they are surviving side by side. No matter how this will end in the future it’s good to have and to see competition in this part. Anyway, it’s the users who decide what he will use.
Conclusion
MARI is a great piece of software with features and possibilities which can dramatically increase your workflow whenever you need a 3D painting tool. The beauty of this software is also in the history of it, developing side by side the needs of artist MARI was originally developed and used inside Avatar and starting by this it’s an industry standard in VFX. However every coin has two sides and also MARI does. All features available in MARI make from it at one side a very complex tool but on the other side also a very „complicated“ one and from my experience some additional training is required to master it. I will not speak about the hardware needs for this because if you decide to use MARI and create some great VFX its necessary to have also the appropriate hardware to it. My personal thoughts are very positive, i like this program and i think its fulfilling every aspect which you could aspect from it, of course you need to find the right tool for it. Bellow you can see some artwork did using MARI and also a short video about the new features inside MARI 1.4.
(c) Snickers 'focus group'. Image courtesy of Framestore NY
