MARI EXTENSION PACK 5 R3

Click here for the complete list of new features and changes !

The second free update for users of Mari Extension Pack 5 is here and it is a big one in both new features added and small useful additions that are 'rounding the corners' of existing workflows (you can thank the COVID-19 Lockdown for the big increase in features .. - too much time indoors)

From Texture Streaming out of Substance Designer, improved Material workflows and new nodes all the way to even more powerful Pattern Creation techniques - this release ties a lot of things together that I started to introduce in the 5 R1 release.

Here are some of my favorites of this new release:

The Pattern Engine got a lot better

Pattern Engine Nodes now allow resampling of images and projections by using the nodes as a Manifold to drive the effect - of course either UV based or in full 3D Triplanar Mode !

You can blur ..

.. well to a point and you will need Mari 4.6v2 or higher. But yes, you can now blur input images !

.. and warp.

A series of warp nodes have been introduced to allow you to warp and offset pixels via normal maps, grey scale inputs etc.

Here's a simple directional warp example for you

You can also easily radialize stuff now using the new Radial UV node !

Your Normal Maps will look correct again ..

You downloaded or created an awesome PBR Material but something looks off in your Mari Viewport and your renders ? Chances are you rotated and transformed the material in a way that didn't recalculate the normal map orientation.

Extension Pack Nodes now fully support OpenGl and DirectX Normal Maps, correctly recalculating image transforms to keep your normal maps looking just the way they are supposed to be !

You don't know what this means ? Well let's have a look at an example where a Normal Map was rotated 90 degrees using Extension Pack Nodes vs standard Mari Nodes.

I hope you see why it is a good thing :)

Material workflows are getting a lot better

Material workflows have finally made their way into Mari with Mari 4.5. While there is a lot to like, there is always room for improvements so I added a whole lot of them!

Pre-authored material templates for different shader types are now available both in the Mari Shelf and the Mari Material Ingest Tool.

These presets have been carefully authored to give you a perfect 'blank-slate' material with maximum control and flexibility over all elements of your shader while keeping performance high ! Don't forget that you can also directly batch create materials from your downloaded PBR materials on disc using the Mari Material Ingester !

Creating of channels for materials is now a one-click breeze with the new 'Channel from Node' tool.

Of course you can fully pipeline it and define Naming Conventions, resolutions etc !

Sometimes you just need to see what does what in your complex compound material.

So I gave material support to the 'Set Nodes to Shader' Tool and the result is an easy to use Material Soloing tool !

Last but not least, we can now have a nice connection to Substance Designer, seeing our Substance Graph updates stream directly into our Mari Project !

Awesome content included

I went ahead and licensed Clement Feuillet's great Gumroad Surface Collection of Grunges and they are now included for all users of Mari Extension Pack and automatically added to your Mari Shelf if you are using Mari 4.5 or higher ! That's a few bucks worth of value right there :)

And there's more

This is just the highlight reel- there is more to discover .. so dive into the full release notes !

Happy Painting,

Jens Kafitz