Release Notes for Mari 3.0v1

Release Date

02 December 2015

Warning: The information regarding the migration from PythonQt to PySide was unintentionally omitted from the first set of Release Notes for Mari 3.0v1, see PythonQt to PySide Change for more information.

System Requirements

Note: 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, recommended, and on which tests have been performed. Your particular needs may vary from that of other users.

Officially Supported Operating Systems

• Mac OS X 10.9.5 (Mavericks) or higher

• Windows 7 64-bit or higher

• Linux 64-bit operating system (CentOS/RHEL 5.4)

Minimum Hardware Requirements

• Quad-core processor

• 10+GB disk space available for caching and temporary files

• At least 4GB RAM

• Display with 1680 x 1050 pixel resolution

• An NVIDIA or AMD* graphics card with the latest drivers

• 1GB of graphics memory

• OpenGL 3.2* or higher

*Displacement preview is currently only available on the cards and drivers that support OpenGL 4.0 or newer.

Recommended System Requirements

• 2.5+Ghz Quad-core processor

• 250+GB disk space available for caching and temporary files. SSD is preferable.

• 16GB RAM with additional virtual memory*

• Display with 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution

• An NVIDIA or AMD* graphics card with the latest drivers

• 2+GB of graphics memory

• OpenGL 4.4 or higher support

*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.

Tested Workstation Hardware

The configurations listed below are those that The Foundry have tested with Mari. Due to the constantly changing nature and wide variety of computer hardware available in the market, The Foundry is unable to officially certify hardware. The 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 for 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 support@thefoundry.co.uk.

Tested Workstation Hardware
Apple	• MacPro4,1 • MacPro5,1 • iMac13,2 • MacBookPro10,1
HP	• HP Z600 • HP Z620 • HP Z800

Tested Workstation Hardware

Apple

• MacPro4,1

• MacPro5,1

• iMac13,2

• MacBookPro10,1

• HP Z600

• HP Z620

• HP Z800

Tested GPU Hardware
AMD Prosumer Graphics Cards	• AMD Radeon HD - D500 • AMD Radeon R7 - 260x
AMD Enterprise Graphics Cards	• AMD FirePro W7000
NVIDIA Prosumer Graphics Cards	• NVIDIA Geforce GTX 680 • NVIDIA Geforce GTX Titan • NVIDIA Geforce GT 650M
NVIDIA Enterprise Graphics Cards	• NVIDIA Quadro 4000 • NVIDIA Quadro K5000 • NVIDIA Quadro M6000

New Features

Node Graph

• Mari's under-the-hood Node Graph is accessible through the Node Graph palette, allowing you to control the layering system more accurately. Nodes are created and manipulated automatically as you interact with the layer system, but you can manipulate individual nodes in the Node Properties palette to achieve the required result.

• Mari's Node Graph has two modes, Basic and Advanced, exposing different levels of detail within the palette. Basic mode, the default mode, only allows you to work with Graph layers from the Layers palette. Advanced mode exposes the entire project in the Node Graph palette, including all layers, channels, and shaders.

Note: You can enable the Advanced Node Graph in the Preferences dialog under Node Graph > General > Advanced View.

Gizmos and Publishing

• Group nodes can be saved as .gizmo files, allowing you to save layers from the Node Graph and share them in a collaborative workflow. The property view of a .gizmo allows you to select which parameters of the member nodes to expose in the exported gizmo.

Gizmos can be loaded back into Mari by:

• registering the .gizmo in the Python API,

• registering the .gizmo in a node catalog file, or

• copying the .gizmo into the ~/Mari/Gizmos directory, which is searched automatically by Mari at startup.

Baking Using Modo

• Mari can now round-trip texture bakes to Modo, allowing you to modify parameters and to see the preview update. You can add new bake recipes easily by creating .lxo files.

Modo Render Integration

• Mari now includes a Modo Render script that walks Mari's Node Graph and sends the shading information to Modo. Modo then renders the scene using its offline renderer.

The Modo Render script also contains examples of how to integrate Mari and an offline renderer.

• Mari uses the following environment variables for loading Bake and Render recipes: MARI_MODO_BAKE_PRESETS and MARI_MODO_RENDER_PRESETS.

Per Channel Color Management

• Colorspace properties are now available on a per-image and per-channel basis through the third-party OpenColorIO library. You can also specify a project default, similar to Nuke's OpenColorIO config setting.

Open Subdivision Support

• Mari now supports geometry subdivision, providing the following benefits:

• Observable smooth surfaces similar to the final offline renderer's subdivision,

• UV layouts can be modified by subdivision, allowing you to view more accurate UV layouts, and

• No need to pre-subdivide geometry.

• The Subdivision dialog includes the option to calculate subdivision in the foreground, by clicking OK, or background by clicking In Background.

• OK - a progress bar displays as Mari calculates the subdivision. Once complete, the level of subdivision specified is applied to the object immediately. An error dialog displays if subdivision fails when run in the foreground.

• In Background - the subdivision calculation is submitted to a background process and no progress bar is displayed. The subdivision Level must be applied manually in the Objects palette when the "running man" icon disappears from the Status Bar.

Arnold, V-Ray, Unreal, and Redshift Shaders

• Mari now includes Arnold, V-Ray, Unreal, and Redshift shaders, allowing you to paint textures underneath more realistic industry-standard shaders, improving the pre-visualization of their textures.

Session Scripts

• Session Scripts allow you to create a light weight archive of Mari projects to merge the data into other projects. Session Scripts can be used to see assets in context with each other or to share data, such as images, channels, and shaders. The data can also be used as a template system for setting up projects with default channels, shaders, and so on.

Texture Transfer Through PartIO

• Mari now allows you to generate height and normal maps between high- and low-polygon models, including seamless blurring across patch boundaries and overlapping UVs by texture transfer.

Entity Locators

• Mari's Move tool now displays axes and the direction of movement, and allows you to rotate and scale geometry.

FBX Geometry Support

• Mari now supports importing geometry from .fbx files, including the selection of specific child geometry from the file using the tree widget.

Selection Groups

• You can now manipulate selection groups using the Python API, allowing you to automate selection group-related functionality in your pipeline.

• ID 42287 - A new smart selection type, called Selection Group, has been added to allow you to cycle through the various selection groups to which a selected face belongs.

Python Upgrade

• Mari now ships with Python 2.7.3, in line with other leading industry products.

Safe Mode

• Mari now includes --safe and --safer startup modes, similar to Nuke's, with different logging levels, which can help diagnose problems when running Mari.

Miscellaneous

• ID 47144 - The Selection Mask layer/node type has been added to the Procedural > Geometry layer menu. This layer/node outputs the current selection as 1.

Feature Enhancements

• You can now fill patches with Face selection enabled, as you would with objects or patches. Simply select the faces you want to fill, and select Patches > Fill from either the menubar or right-click menu.

• You can now create a Pass Through blend mode for Group layers that work similarly to the Pass Through blend mode in Photoshop. In the Layers palette, with the Group layer selected, click on the Pass Through icon.

• ID 43764 - Object metadata is now written into new versions of loaded .abc or .fbx geometry, so that the metadata can be read later on and the scene recreated using Session Scripts.

• ID 46073 - Support has been added for passing compression options for the Python API to the OpenEXR file writer.

• ID 50082 - The Data > Cache category has been renamed to Data > Project in the Mari Preferences.

Bug Fixes

• ID 32251 - Pressing the PgUp and PgDown keys moved between the previous channel and next channel, rather than moving to the top and bottom of the visible area of the channel list.

• ID 34502 - It was not possible to launch Mari with user-customizations disabled.

Two modes have now been added: --safe and --safer. This disables user-customizations, among other things.

• ID 34542 - The shortcut to toggle the Tool Properties palette (F7) was unassigned, and it no longer appeared in the Manage Keyboard Shortcuts dialog.

• ID 37717 - In some cases, Mari crashed when trying to save.

• ID 37927 - It was not possible to rename objects from the name field in the Objects palette.

• ID 40963 - Mari crashed when loading projectors using the GUI.

• ID 41487 - Mari did not recognize OpenColorIO 'looks' contained in an OCIO color configuration file, such as config.ocio.

• ID 42426 - There was no native support for the V-Ray shader.

• ID 42861 - There was a typo in the shader source code files that meant "Bitangent" appeared as "biTangent".

• ID 43732 - Attempting to undo caching did not always undo the action.

• ID 44964 - Copying a group layer or layer mask did not deep-copy the image sets of the member layers.

• ID 47732 - The Nuke<>Mari Bridge mapping scheme was serializing incorrectly, causing the bridge script to fail.

• ID 47749 - The default layout of the layer stack meant that the procedural properties section was mostly obscured from view.

• ID 48268 - Mari read the MARI_PLUGINS_PATH environment variable in the opposite order to the expected UNIX order, giving precedence to those entries nearest the end of the string.

• ID 48861 - The colorspace toolbar locked up and did not respond to the toggle on/off management button.

• ID 49335 - Converting multiple procedural layers to be paintable sometimes failed or caused Mari to crash, as the order in which they were processed could cause them to conflict.

• ID 49600 - Mari sometimes offset each patch in a project by -1.

• ID 49671 - The Nuke<>Mari Bridge was failing to send components under certain conditions.

• ID 49690 - Repeatedly copying a channel when an object's UV map encroached into negative space, caused Mari to crash.

• ID 51062 - Mac OS X only: Menu items were grayed out and unavailable if that particular Mari session was the first to create the Mari.ini file.

Developer Notes

These are the changes relevant to developers.

New Features

PythonQt to PySide Change

In 3.0v1, Mari migrated from PythonQt to PySide for Python bindings. Although the functionalities remain the same, there are some differences such as function signatures, which may affect existing scripts. This section lists the changes to Mari's Python engine, and some notes regarding new features in Mari 3.0v1 as well as the changes resulting from the migration from PythonQt to PySide.

Major Changes

• Updated the version of Python shipped with Mari from 2.6.5 to 2.7.3.

• Changed the Python API bindings generation from PythonQt to PySide.

• Added Python API bindings for the new Node Graph feature.

• Added Python API bindings for the new OpenSubdiv feature.

• Added Python API bindings for the new Colorspace support.

• Added Python API bindings for the new Locator feature.

• Added Python API bindings to interact with new Image and Geometry CAPI plug-ins.

• Added many functions to OpenColorIO support.

Implicit Python API Changes Resulting from the Change to PySide Binding Generation

You should not use temporary objects when connecting to signals as they make PySide crash due to reference counting. Always store off the temporary object so a reference is held to it and it doesn't get garbage collected. The following example crashes:

def createComboBox():
  return PySide.QtGui.QComboBox()
def doSomething():
  print 'Hello World!'
createComboBox().currentIndexChanged.connect(doSomething)

As a workaround, do the following:

combo_box = createComboBox()
combo_box.currentIndexChanged.connect(doSomething)

Note: This is stated in the PySide documentation, see: https://wiki.qt.io/PySide_Shiboken_Object_Ownership#Common_pitfalls.

PySide is strict on types, so some functions do not accept the equivalent integer value to an enum. For example, the following no longer works:

channel = mari.current.channel()
channel.setDepth(16, 1)

Do the following instead:

channel.setDepth(mari.Image.DEPTH_HALF, mari.Channel.CONVERT_ALL)

List of Minor API Changes Since 2.6v5

• Exposed MkdirCommand to the Python API.

• Added MriRegExpChannelNameExtractor and Python API.

• Added extra signals to ImageManager for Python API.

• Added transform() method to Image Python API.

• Added project signal callbacks to Python API.

• Added Python bindings for selection group. This implied creating five more API objects, SelectionGroupManager, SelectionGroup, ObjectSelectionGroup, FaceSelectionGroup and PatchSelectionGroup. Also, added an example script in the Python examples folder that apppears in Mari Python examples menu.

• Texture Transfer - Added Python API for displacement, height, and Gaussian blur operations.

• Texture Transfer - Added supporting GUI for new operations chains through Python.

• Added select selection groups through Python.

• Node Graph API.

• Added PythonAPI to support CAPI Image plug-in.

• Added code to pass extra parameters from Python to CAPI texture and geometry.

• OpenColorIO - Added OpenColorIO to Python API.

• OpenColorIO - Extended ImageManager in the Python API so the colorspace properties can be specified when opening an image.

• OpenColorIO - Extended Image in Python API so the colorspace properties can be accessed and modified.

• OpenColorIO - Extended Python API to include methods checking whether a colorspace or role is present in a configuration file.

• OpenColorIO - Made Python API throw an exception when a colorspace stage argument is out of range.

• OpenColorIO - Registered ColorspaceType enum with Python API.

• Custom Display Pythom API - Added Python function to create a PySide widget that hosts the custom widget for display driver API.

• Fixed Python API channel info decorator so it correctly sets the specified filespace.

• Deprecated old COLOR and SCALAR system in Python API.

• Added colorspace defaults changed signal to Python API.

• Added colorspace config changed signal to Python API.

• OpenColorIO - Added method to resolve automatic file names to the config class within the Python API.

• Added Python API for subdivision.

• Added method to Python API to determine whether a config file name is a standard one shipped with Mari.

• Added ability to specify the name of the colorspace config changed signal in the Python API.

• Added a Python API signal for changes made to a channel's scalar colorspace config.

• Renamed Python API class EventWrapper to WrappedEvent so that it would build and work with PySide.

• Switched Python API bindings over from PythonQt to PySide.

• Removed redundant PythonQt ways of signal connection in mari.utils.connect().

• Added Python LocatorEntity class.

• Extended GeoEntity to get and set transforms.

• Extended GeoManager to list locators.

• Added pause shader compilation on the canvas in Python API.

• Added support for passing compression option from Python API to OpenEXR file writer.

• Re-enabled the DIFFERENCE blend mode for layers in the Python API.

• Added hasAdjustmentStack, isAdjustmentStackEnabled, setAdjustmentStackEnabled to Python API.

• Python API - Separated ImageSet.importImages() and ImageSet.importImagesFromDict() to support importing images from a dict of Image objects and file paths.

Texture Access API

• A new C API has been added, allowing you to manipulate texture data live in Mari to improve the inter-operability of Mari with external renderers. The C API allows external renders to request specific texture data and apply it to geometry when rendering the scene from Mari.

• Accessing texture data using the C API provides the external application with real-time uncompressed raw data, managed by Mari's DataManager, allowing for efficient memory paging.

Display Driver API

• A new C API has been added, allowing you to write your own Mari plug-ins to receive and display external, streamed image data such as external renderer results.

The Display Driver API enables Mari to be integrated into LookDev pipelines more closely because it forms a part of LookDev integration in which Mari sends texture and shading information to external rerenderers and Mari receives the rendered result.

Custom Graph Context API

• A new C API has been added, allowing you to add contextual information to a node in Mari's Node Graph.

The Custom Graph Context API enables Mari to be integrated into LookDev pipelines more closely.

The example usages of Custom Graph Context API includes:

• an external real-time viewport,

• custom exporting and importing,

• adding custom attributes,

• external and network rendering or baking, and

• porting shading information to other software.

Geometry Access API

• The Mari C API has been extended to include two more geometry access APIs, MriGeometryAccessPlugin and MriUserGeometryOperationPlugin. These allow you to create plug-ins to access the geometries inside Mari projects and to perform operations on those geometries.

The Example OBJ Exporter, a built-in example geometry access plug-in, is also available. It demonstrates the ability to access the geometry and perform operations on it, and exports the geometry in the .obj format.

Miscellaneous

• ID 51590 - You can clear all node properties from the Node Properties palette by entering the following command in the Python Console:

b = mari.actions.get("/Mari/NodeGraph/Delete All Properties") b.trigger()

Feature Enhancements

• ID 44024 - A Python API method, removeKeyFrame, has been added to remove key frames from an imageset.

• ID 46034 - Example code has been added to the Python Developer's Guide to create a projector from an Alembic file.

• ID 46073 - Support has been added for passing compression options for the Python API to the OpenEXR file writer.

• ID 46539 - Notes have been added to GeoEntity.patchList() and GeoEntityVersion.patchList() to indicate that GeoEntity returns the combined list of patches from all versions while GeoEntityVersion returns the list of patches only from the version.

• ID 49554 - Python API: Mari's AdjustableLayer class now includes isAdjustmentStackEnabled() and setAdjustmentStackEnabled() methods.

• ID 50171 - Python API: The ImageSet.importImages() and ImageSet.importImagesFromDict() functions have been separated in order to support importing images from a dict of Image objects and file paths.

Bug Fixes

• ID 47138 - Linux only: The Mari bundle did not contain the libQtDesigner.so file, which meant that QtUiTools was unavailable.

• ID 48239 - The QtUiTools module was missing from Mari's compilation of PySide.