9 December 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.
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 Node Graph 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 Node Graph 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.
A new Grunge shelf has been added to the Shelf palette, which comes loaded with high-quality grunge textures created by industry professionals. It includes:
The new shelf provides quick access to these textures for use as stencils, projections, and for creating your own Smart Masks and Materials.
ID 568792 - Mari will now add the default suffix for project backup restoration if the suffix is not specified.
ID 568794 - During project load, Mari now attempts to repair any data blocks that are missing from the project sub-cache by recovering them from the project's backup location.
Please note that this only applies to projects that have a configured backup location and saved backups to recover from.
ID 580058 - The Restore menu in the Projects tab now asks for a confirmation to help prevent accidental overwriting of project data.
ID 560644 - The Image Manager palette now has the ability to Package images which allows artists to save them out to a single directory.
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.
ID 557776 - Mari Non-commercial is now blocked for all builds except release and release candidate phase builds.
ID 581146 - Mari Alpha and Beta pre-release builds are now time-limited for 90 days after their release.
ID 565178 - Mari's version of Curl has been updated to v8.5.0 and the version of OpenSSL to v3.0.13
ID 568804 - Mari now has the ability to swap node placements in the Node Graph. To replace the position of 2 nodes, hold down S while dragging and releasing a node over the desired one. The shortcut can be edited in the Shortcut Manager.
ID 568806 - Whole Backdrop Select mode has been introduced as part of our continued efforts to improve the experience of node interactions. This mode allows you to click anywhere within a Backdrop node to select it and any contained nodes instead of needing to click the titlebar of the Backdrop.
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 568791 - Mari now has a safe-guard against accidental project directory deletion as a consequence of editing the project's Summary.txt file.
ID 578497 - During project load, if Mari encounters a mismatch between an image's stored size and the actual data content size, additional information is now printed to the MariLog.txt including the image's stored and data content sizes and its UUID.
ID 578517 - Mari is now more tolerant against corruptions due to image size mismatches between stored image size and the actual data content size found during project load. The stored image size will now be adjusted based on the actual data content size. In these instances, a notification dialog will list errors that have been found while loading the project.
ID 560638 - Some of the Shelf palette's 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 Shelf. 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 500659 - Transformations set with GeoEntity.setTranform() and LocatorEntity.setTranform() would revert to their previous transformation when the entities' transform handles were manipulated in the Canvas. To prevent this behavior, LocatorEntity.setTransform() and GeoEntity.setTransform() now reset entities' internally cached transformation driven by the transform handle in the Canvas.
Additionally, GeoEntity.resetHandleTransform() and LocatorEntity.resetLocatorHandleTransform() functions have been implemented to reset the entities' internally cached transformation driven by the transform handle in the Canvas.
ID 522699 - The Python API GeoEntity.channelList() function incorrectly returned the most recently deleted Channel.
ID 568783 - Under certain conditions, the Python API would not return the correct NodeGraphPalette() object for the Node Graph palette.
ID 568805 - The Python API did not raise an error when creating Paint or Bake Point nodes using the NodeGraph.createNode() function. The dedicated createPaintNode() and createBakePointNode() functions should be used for creating these node types.
ID 575949 - Removing Objects via the Python API would not remove their associated Selection Groups.
ID 576042 - When attempting to remove an object via the Python API, which has already been deleted in the UI, Mari was not correctly raising an error and instead crashed on exit.
ID 590335 - An Image Corruption warning was incorrectly displayed when importing nodes using the Python API nodegraph.importNodesFromArchive() function and the destination Object had a different number of Patches compared to the source Object.
Shaders/General/CubeRender.fragShaders/include/CubeRender_Main.glslh Shaders/include/CubeRender_Utils.glslhID 560619 - Selection Groups were not restored correctly from backups.
ID 568781 - The Automatic Project Backup system would incorrectly overwrite existing project without checking first if the backup project is usable.
If there is a point of failure when restoring a project from a backup, Mari would report it at the end which could lead to unnecessary waiting times.
Any of the created directories and files of the backup system were not properly removed which caused the project to store unnecessary data on disk.
ID 568793 - Occasionally, project restore would fail with a UUID collision, sub-cache directory already exists error.
ID 562902 - Baking a Bake Point immediately after switching to a new Object Version did not update all Patches.
ID 568802 - When Bake Point baking failed, Mari would incorrectly display the failed baked result.
ID 560480 - .sp1d LUT files were not loading into the View Transform correctly.
ID 576090 - The sRGB2Linear node was producing incorrect results.
ID 584427 - Selecting the new default Paint Node Creation Preset swatches while the Scalar Data checkbox was enabled would select an incorrect fill color for the node.
Please note that selecting custom swatches from the Color Presets Shelf for scalar data still results in a fill color that does not match the displayed swatch color, as noted in the Known Issues section.
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 584273 - Extra Image Manager tabs were not being closed off when a project was closed and persisted to other projects.
ID 576462 - The Example Project had Basic Lighting mode enabled by default, rather than Full.
ID 405148 - Duplicated or pasted Input and Output nodes inside a Group node were not correctly registered as Input and Output ports on the node.
Additionally, a new Python API exception has been added to mari.Node.setName() which will raise an exception when naming an Input or Output node inside a Group node to share the same name as another Input or Output node within the Group.
ID 551853 - Applying Patch Mirroring or Transformations to Paint nodes inside Groups would have no effect and raise an error.
ID 560621 - Importing Nodes in the Node Graph was not preserving their layout correctly.
ID 560625 - Imported or pasted nodes were automatically moved to the closest edge. This has been disabled in order to retain the original layout of the nodes.
ID 560633 - When upgrading existing nodes to a new version, Mari would display the output names incorrectly.
ID 560634 - When upgrading existing nodes to a new version, the input edge text would not be updated correctly.
ID 561401 - Certain Groups remained visually present in the Node Graph after being deleted or converted to Smart Masks.
ID 568817 - Paint nodes were not being copied between Objects with differing Patch counts or layouts correctly.
ID 582982 - Selecting multiple Paint nodes with a marquee selection caused a lag when the Paint nodes had different colorspace roles.
ID 584315 - Copying and pasting a Group node with attributes promoted through two Group levels resulted in the promoted attributes becoming incorrectly linked to each other.
ID 584566 - Repositioning nodes with opened node properties had slower performance compared to nodes without visible properties.
ID 586151 - Promoted knobs on Group nodes were intermittently becoming linked to attributes on other nodes during project load.
ID 587640 - Grouping a node selection created additional Input nodes for unconnected node inputs.
ID 589490 - Copying Input or Output nodes between Groups incremented the nodes' names unnecessarily.
ID 560626 - Mari would occasionally crash when merging multi-part geometry data.
ID 560627 - Importing Node Graphs containing a large number of Paint nodes was causing an incorrect texture display issue.
ID 560630 - Mari would occasionally not display textures correctly when upgrading an existing project to a new version.
ID 560645 - Nodes were incorrectly failing to upgrade to a new version.
ID 560646 - Unnecessary shelf thumbnail updates from disk were causing a startup slowdown.
ID 560648 - Running Python scripts many times could intermittently crash Mari.
ID 568803 - When working on a project with a Node Graph that exceeds the limits of the graphics card, Mari would display a graphical corruption in the viewport after a Bake Point has been baked.
ID 568809 - Mari would occasionally crash when deleting multiple nodes.
ID 568816 - An internal data handling issue was causing project data corruption.
ID 589704 - Opening projects from a previous Mari version containing Material nodes that had an unregistered Shader Model caused Mari to crash.
ID 563355 - The Post Process Command field in the Export Manager had no effect for Ptex exports.
Please note that post-process commands for Ptex exports are currently executed on the same thread as the export, so using post-process commands for Ptex exports may take longer than expected.
ID 563583 - Using the Node Graph context menu's File > Export action on Channel nodes incorrectly spawned an empty dialog. Channel Export or the Export Manager should be used for exporting from Channels.
ID 582282 - Subdivided Ptex Objects created from .fbx or .abc files could not be painted on, and running the Bakery on these Objects caused Mari to crash.
ID 568800 - When undoing the deletion of an Object Version of an Object that had an associated Selection Group, Mari would assign the Selection Group to any of the existing Object Versions even though it did not belong.
ID 573979 - Selecting a Selection Group shared by multiple Objects caused Mari to crash.
ID 560629 - Custom third-party nodes were triggering potential shader errors and redundant Convert Layers warning dialogs.
Additionally, GLRender.registerCustomNodeUpgrade() has been added to allow specific remapping of old node VersionUUID, inputs, outputs, and attributes to a new node for more flexible updating of existing nodes.
ID 576661 - Defining and calling shader functions named after the MaterialX library functions caused a shader error.
ID 560622 - Occasionally, Shelf tree branch icons were not displaying correctly.
ID 560637 - The Shelf system would display warning dialogs in the terminal or execution modes, where no UI should appear.
ID 560649 - Dragging multiple images from the Image Manager to a Shelf would incorrectly result in only one image.
ID 560650 - Reassigning a new thumbnail to a Python Script Shelf Item was causing the image path in the Edit Script dialog to be missing.
ID 564457 - Python Script Shelf Items were not loading correctly if the script contained a line that ends with .py.
ID 575461 - Thumbnails and tooltip information were not being shown for Material or Smart Mask Shelf Items that were imported into the Project Shelf after the current project had been saved.
ID 589785 - Mari skipped loading Material thumbnails or metadata if either failed during import into the Shelf palette.
ID 578007 - When using the Grid Warp Tool on an area larger than the Paint Buffer, Mari would incorrectly warp the paint from the opposite side of the Paint Buffer.
ID 583503 - Rotating or scaling a Marquee Selection caused Mari to crash.
ID 9566 - The Sorted by combobox was not initially displayed in the Projectors palette.
ID 560628 - The mouse cursor would appear hidden when message dialogs were displayed.
ID 568780 - When attempting to import a project from a path that does not exist, the progress bar would indefinitely be stuck in the Importing state.
ID 573557 - Subdivided geometries were not respecting the orientation attribute of their source USD file, and were generating inverted surface normals when the orientation attribute was set to leftHanded.
ID 583692 - The USD Look Exporter now applies the UsdShadeMaterialBindingAPI schema to nodes with material bindings.
ID 582834 - Due to limitations of our current OCIO implementation, bright lighting may cause some painted values to appear over-exposed and banded in the viewport shader.
ID 589606 - Using the Tow Brush tool on Scalar Paint data produces an incorrect color for the towed paint.
ID 590190 - In Paint node, Bake Point node and Channel creation dialogs, selecting custom swatches from the Color Presets Shelf results in a fill color that does not match the displayed swatch color when the Scalar Data checkbox is ticked.
ID 568808 / 590368 - The new Node to Image Selection and Image to Node Selection actions do not currently have corresponding menu items within the Node Graph context menu.
ID 568808 / 590393 - Image to Node Selection only has an effect in the NODE_GRAPH shortcut context.
ID 568808 / 590391 - When multiple images have been loaded from the same path, Node to Image Selection will always select the most recently imported image.
ID 562492 - It is currently not possible to pan in the Node Graph with MMB or Alt+LMB while a node edge has been picked up by mouse cursor.
As a workaround, two alternative methods can be used for navigating the Node Graph while a node edge is attached to the cursor:
ID 568807 - A new menu item has been added to the Node Graph context menu, Assign Geo-Channel, for quick assignment of Geo-Channels to selected Geo-Channel nodes. However, this menu item is unfortunately not functioning correctly in this release.
ID 540263 - Mari crashes on shutdown if 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 |
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