10 October 2024
With Mari 7.1v1 you can quickly send any image to a brand new 2D Painting Mode inside Mari itself. Paint custom decals and clone out imperfections with full access to Mari's powerful Paint Buffer, Node Graph, Layer Stack, and all of the functionality you've come to love without breaking your muscle memory.
Here is what to expect in our first Beta:
Since Mari 4.6v1, artists have been able to create Custom Procedurals in our material system in order to create dynamic breakup masks and advanced material effects. To increase visibility, the decision has been made to rebrand Custom Procedurals as Smart Masks to help users visualise how they might want to use the procedural groups in their projects. All of the existing functionality of the Custom Procedural nodes remains the same and existing nodes will continue to work as expected.
In addition to this, a brand new group of over 50 Smart Masks and utilities has been added to the Shelf Palette. As with Custom Procedurals, these new Smart Masks can be used in conjunction with Geo-Channels or baked maps from the Bakery in order to drive material looks such as Ambient Occlusion Dust, Crusty Dirt, Drips, Scratches and more. You can also use the 2D Placement group and other utility nodes to help debug and adjust your own creations further. Each Smart Mask has been designed by studio artist Stuart Ansley to be completely procedural and modular, meaning you can easily chop and change parts of the Smart Masks to create your own unique results.
For Nodegraph users, we've introduced the long-awaited Switch node. The Switch node allows artists to create multiple variations of a texture, such as 'Clean' and 'Dirty', and be able to quickly change which upwards stream is used with a simple UI toggle that chooses which input should be actively compiled by the shader. This UI toggle can be promoted within a Material, Group or Smart Mask/Custom Procedural node for easy access.
In our endeavour to improve the general user experience of the Nodegraph and remove excess clicks from the artist's day, we've made a small but impactful change to the Paint node. When creating a new Paint node, you will now be able to select from a batch of pre-selected swatches that are regularly used by artists; meaning you no longer have to open the Color Picker to choose mid-grey again. In addition to this, a new Shelf called Color Presets has been added to allow artists to add their own swatches to the Paint node creation list.
ID 584641 - The Paint Buffer's Bake Behavior setting has been limited to Auto Bake And Clear in 2D Paint Mode.
ID 577952 - New Channel creation is now only applied to Objects in the same mode as the current Object (i.e., only 2D or 3D).
ID 580058 - The "Restore" menu in the Projects tab now asks for a confirmation to help prevent accidental overwriting of project data.
ID 568792 - Mari will now add the default suffix for project backup restoration if the suffix is not specified.
ID 568808 - Two new actions have been implemented to aid Node/Image handling. These are:
Additionally, Mari now maintains image selections across multiple Image Manager tabs.
The Python API for images has been extended, with the following Python API functions being added to the mari.Image class:
mari.Image.selected()mari.Image.setSelected()mari.Image.category()mari.Image.setCategory()The mari.ImageManager class's list() and selected() functions also now take in an optional category parameter to return the subset belonging to the given category.
The default shortcut for Whole Backdrop Select mode is [W] - while holding the key, it is now possible to click and drag anywhere within Backdrops to reposition it, making reorganising large node networks while zoomed out far less fiddly! [Shift] and [Ctrl] modifiers can be used to add or remove from the current selection, respectively. Custom shortcuts including [Shift] or [Ctrl] modifiers will automatically be used for adding/subtracting from the selection.
ID 568818 - The Edge Sever mode for cutting node connections now automatically disables when the hotkey is released.
A new "Select Backdrop Only" action has been implemented to add a dedicated shortcut for selecting only a Backdrop node, without selecting its contents. Selecting a Backdrop while holding [B] will select the Backdrop but not any of its contained nodes. The shortcut can be customised in the Shortcut Manager.
As with the new "Whole Backdrop Select" action, [Shift] and [Ctrl] modifiers can be used to add or remove from the current selection, respectively. Custom shortcuts including [Shift] or [Ctrl] modifiers will automatically be used for adding/subtracting from the selection.
ID 560638 - Some of the context menu items have been renamed such as:
Add New Shelf -> New
Load Shelf -> Import
Save Shelf -> Export
and some subsequent dialog texts:
Load Shelf -> Import Shelf
Save Shelf -> Export Shelf
ID 560639 - Importing a Shelf now creates a new shelf if no shelves are selected.
ID 560640 - The Shelf system now has a new menu item called Package. This allows artists to save shelf data while localizing the referenced resources to the same location for better portability.
ID 560643 - Shelf items now carry thumbnails in their own data.
A new option Package Nodes is now available to the user, which exports nodes while localizing their resources for better portability.
The Import Material and Import Custom Procedural menu items have been removed in favor of Import Nodes.
ID 560651 - The Edit Script dialog in the Shelf now displays the script name in the title.
ID 583096 - The Shelf Palette now allows the import and export of a new shelf item called Node Packages.
Similarly to Materials and Custom Procedurals, Node Packages bundle up the node network, along with any source images, into a single file. This provides easier portability of premade Node Graphs between artists by removing the need to re-import images that cannot be found at their original paths.
ID 583522 - Image Write node colorspace settings would revert to default when loading a project.
ID 584271 - The Image Name property of Image Write nodes would revert to the default name when loading a project.
ID 578687 - Deleting 2D Paint Objects containing Image Write nodes did not remove their linked images from the Image Manager.
ID 579533 - Sending images from the Image Manager to 2D Paint Mode was applying an incorrect colorspace conversion.
ID 583460 - Image Write node images were always created as 8-bit instead of matching the bit-depth of the 2D Paint Object.
ID 583477 - After reopening a project that contained an existing Image Write node, a duplicate linked image would be created in the Image Manager.
ID 575953 - Mari would crash when dragging and dropping images from the Image Manager to the Node Graph if the image path contained non-ASCII characters.
ID 583992 - When Packaging Images via the Image Manager, Mari would incorrectly raise an error.
ID 584273 - Extra Image Manager tabs were not being closed off when a project was closed and persisted to other projects.
ID 580851 - The updated Windows installer was not replacing placeholder tokens in the status bar during installation.
ID 580853 - The Mari Non-commercial shortcut created by the updated Windows installer was missing an argument to use WinTab for graphics tablet interactions.
ID 584949 - During installation, the Windows User Account Control dialog showed a temporary name for the installer.
ID 551853 - Applying Patch Mirroring or Transformations to Paint nodes inside Groups would have no effect and raise an error.
ID 562747 - Nodes were not being automatically connected to the current node selection when they were created.
ID 568817 - Paint nodes were not being copied between Objects with differing Patch counts or layouts correctly.
ID 584566 - Repositioning nodes with opened node properties had slower performance compared to nodes without visible properties.
orientation attribute of their source USD file, and were generating inverted surface normals when the orientation attribute was set to leftHanded.ID 568808
actions = widget.actions() is used to add an Action to the Tools Toolbar. To workaround this, we have exposed ToolBar.insertAction()Whilst Mari 7.1v1 remains on VFX Reference Platform CY2023, the following libraries have been updated:
| Mari 7.0 | Mari 7.1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Expat | 2.2 | 2.5 |
| FBX | 2020.1.1 | 2020.3.4 |
| libxml2 | 2.9.9 | 2.12.5 |
| OpenCV | 2.4.13.7 | 4.9.0 |
| PTex | 2.4.1 | 2.4.2 |
| Curl | 7.72.0 | 8.5.0 |
| OpenSSL | 1.1.1m | 3.0.13 |
Mari increases its level of performance with newer, more advanced hardware configurations. However, Mari is tested and capable of operating on many older, prior-generation systems. For this reason we are listing below-minimum requirements, which are recommended, and on which tests have been performed. Your particular needs may vary from that of other users.
Linux Desktop Managers
Mari is officially tested on GNOME. While it generally performs well on other desktop managers, most of our bug fixes will target this. We would be interested to know if there are any other preferred desktop managers to consider in the future so feel free to share your specifications with our Support Team at support@foundry.com
*Displacement preview is currently only available on the cards and drivers that support OpenGL 4.0 or newer.
*The use of virtual memory improves stability and helps prevent data loss on large projects.
'Recommended' does not guarantee that it meets your particular needs.
The configurations listed below are those that Foundry have tested with Mari. Due to the constantly changing nature and wide variety of computer hardware available in the market, Foundry is unable to officially certify hardware. The list below can be used as a recommendation and does not guarantee that it meets your particular needs.
Please download and install the latest graphics driver from the NVIDIA or AMD websites, and ensure that you are using 8.982.1 drivers or higher for AMD cards.
If you encounter any issues, please contact Customer Support directly through the Support Portal at the following address: https://support.foundry.com.
| HP | Dell | Lenovo |
|---|---|---|
| HP XW6600 HP Z600 HP Z620 HP Z640 HP Z8 G4 Workstation |
Dell Precision 7820 | Lenovo P620 |
| Vendor | Tested GPUs |
|---|---|
| AMD Prosumer Graphics Cards | Radeon Pro 560 Radeon Pro 5500M Radeon Pro W6700 Radeon Pro W6800 |
| NVIDIA Prosumer Graphics Cards | NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1070 NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1080 NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1080 Ti NVIDIA Geforce RTX A2000 NVIDIA Geforce RTX A3000 Mobile NVIDIA Geforce RTX A4000 NVIDIA Geforce RTX 3080 NVIDIA Geforce RTX 3080 Ti Mobile NVIDIA Geforce RTX 3090 NVIDIA Geforce RTX 4090 |
| NVIDIA Enterprise Graphics Cards | NVIDIA Quadro P2000 NVIDIA Quadro P3200 NVIDIA Quadro P4000 NVIDIA Quadro P5000 NVIDIA Quadro RTX 8000 |
Copyright © 2024 The Foundry Visionmongers Ltd.