MARI: Review by local 3D Artist Josh Purple!

Local 3D artist Josh Purple has over 16 years experience in the art & design world, with skill sets ranging from 3D character animation, cartoon, engineering & visualization, and more.
He been using MARI, the 3D Painting & Texturing software from The Foundry, as an increasing part of his texturing workflow.
Josh was kind enough to share a few words.

“I’ve been using MARI for a couple of months now.  It’s been excellent, and I’m very interested to see what MARI 3 is like.  MARI seems to work a lot like Photoshop on a 3D model, in all the best ways.  Very intuitive, easy to learn, great results, lots of options & workflows, great real-time in-viewport preview, -and that’s from using on my Windows 7 64bit, 32 GB RAM, i7-4770K CPU@3.5GHz, 1TB SSD, GTX 760.  It eats RAM & disk space aggressively, but it balances and displays system resources very well.  One of the first workflows I tried was PTEX;
ZBrush (with zero UV work done) > Export OBJ > MARI > PTEX, and it worked great.

ZBrush model (one of the dragon head variations) –

Without doing any UV work, I would export each tool from ZBrush, import it (selecting the PTEX dia. box options when importing), and texture it in MARI.  I used photographs of alligators to paint textures on the model (you can see them in the upper right).  Below is an example of the head (as just the individual tool, no eyes, teeth, horns, etc.), screenshot from MARI;

​I then import the models into 3ds Max, and render them together using Vray.  Which is what I am currently working on, & Vray has been working perfectly with the VrayPtex map.

Being able to create multi-million polygon count models & texture them without doing any UV work is very nice.”

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