London, 28 March 2019 - Foundry, the leading developer of software for the media and entertainment and digital design industries, today releases Mari 4.5. This latest Mari update introduces a transformative Materials System that allows artists to create high-volume assets faster and more cost-effectively, in the same industry-standard package used for complex hero assets.

Until now, artists would go through a series of manual steps to set up procedural layers across their channels, in order to achieve a material-driven base look for their assets. This new workflow enables artists to rapidly block out the look of an asset using material presets, and achieve the same result with just a few drag-and-drop actions. This way they can use Mari to perfect the initial art direction of an asset in record time.  

In addition, Mari 4.5 allows artists to quickly import and use thousands of Physically Based Rendering (PBR) texture sets with the Material Ingest Tool. This creates the presets, sets up the controls, and loads everything into Mari so it’s ready to use, allowing artists to continually grow their material library.

Sharing isolated material set-ups across teams is also easier and reduces the amount of repetitive set-up required, as everything needed to replicate the material gets compressed, along with source images, into a single file. This eliminates the artists’ need to manage multiple files to share a Mari material.

With this update, Mari becomes the complete painting package for artists, enabling them to create both hero assets and high-volume, background assets, as well as everything in-between.

Rory Woodford, Product Manager, Mari, comments:

“This latest release is a game-changer for Mari, as the Materials System creates new possibilities for texturing artists. Mari 4.5 offers the best of both worlds: we are empowering artists to create high-volume assets far more rapidly and cost-effectively, while also giving them access to the beloved package they are used to, to create complex hero assets. Mari 4.5 is part of our ongoing mission to improve the tools that artists depend upon to create increasingly innovative work on shorter schedules.”

Other additions brought by Mari 4.5 are simple layering (artists are able to control the material properties, visibility of each component, and global material visibility, from a single area of the interface for their entire project), material grouping (a group with multi-channel layer behaviors that allows artists to apply adjustments to material streams independently of the rest of the layers in the channel), a new Arnold shader provided by Autodesk and an updated node graph UX that supports multiple output ports for additional arbitrary data streams, unlocking more complex workflows.

Mari 4.5 is available for purchase on Foundry’s website and via accredited resellers.

About Mari 4.5

Find out more about the Mari 4.5 release on its dedicated release page here.

About Mari

Mari® is Foundry's cutting-edge 3D painting and texturing tool that combines power and performance to handle the most complex assets.

About Foundry

Foundry develops creative software for the digital design, media and entertainment industries. With a 20-year heritage and a portfolio of award-winning products, Foundry advances the art and technology of visual experience in partnership with creative leaders around the globe.

Clients and partners include major feature film studios and post-production houses such as Pixar, ILM, MPC, Walt Disney Animation, Weta Digital, DNEG, and Framestore as well as automotive, footwear, apparel and technology companies such as Mercedes, New Balance, Adidas and Google. Foundry partners with these companies to solve complex visualization challenges to turn incredible ideas into reality.

The company’s products are used to create breathtaking visual effects sequences on a wide range of feature films, video-on-demand, television and commercials. Foundry software was integral in the making of every VFX Oscar-winning film, award-winning TV show and commercial for more than a decade. Founded in 1996, Foundry is headquartered in London, with 300 staff and a presence in the US, China, Japan, Australia and Europe. In 2015, the London Stock Exchange named Foundry one of the “1000 Companies to Inspire Britain.” It regularly features in The Sunday Times’ Tech Track as one of Britain’s fastest-growing private technology companies.

For more information visit www.foundry.com.



Contact:

Madalina Grigorie, PR and Communications Manager, Foundry
+44 (0) 20 3976 1826 (ext. 2421)
+44 (0)738 7059 069
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