MARI Tutorials

We’ll begin this process by learning some basics about MARI. Things like bringing in geometry, creating channels and shaders and understanding the concept of the paint buffer. Next we'll begin painting our character by laying down a base color and then building some variation on top of that. We'll walk step by step through adding paint detail on top of paint detail until we end up with our finished painting. We'll wrap this course up by learning a little about color correction and then how to export our textures out of MARI. After completing this tutorial, you will have enough knowledge of this powerful texture painting application to begin painting your own characters without the use of photographs.

We'll start the tutorial by learning how to bring in some displacement information from another application into our new MARI project. From here we will focus on painting small surface details for our creature and applying them as bump. Next we will learn how to use the paint through tool to project photographic texture on various areas. We'll be moving back and fourth between image projecting and painting in an effort to make the two flow seamlessly together. Next we will learn several different techniques for color correction both our painted as well as photographic textures. To wrap things up we will learn how to bake all of our textures down and export them for use in our primary 3D application. After completing this tutorial, you should be able to blend hand painted textures with photographic ones in our own MARI projects.

In the new updates to MARI, there are a number of workflow-enhancing tools, features, and interface updates that have been added. We'll start by looking at some of the small changes and additions to the interface, including a new channel pop-up, changes to the visibility toggle, and the ability to bake paint directly into a new channel. We'll talk about the addition of PTEX to the MARI workflow, enabling us to paint textures without the need for UVS. We'll also talk about the new shader modules. We'll cover the displacement preview module. We'll talk about displaying models as reflective surfaces with the environment sphere module. We'll also talk about the new ability to use seamless, tile-able textures in our workflow with the tiled and masked tiled shader modules. Finally, we'll cover the high-pass filter and check out the new bridge between MARI and NUKE.

Welcome to the Professional Series for Texturing Military Vehicles in MARI, an advanced learning guide for skilled artists brought to you by Digital-Tutors, the world’s largest online CG training library. This course was designed to help develop your MARI workflows, and give you some concepts to keep in mind as you go through the process of painting texture maps for your military vehicles. The objectives for this fast-paced course include looking at several different workflows and techniques for texturing a military transport. These concepts include using a layer-based approach to add flexibility to your textures and using snapshots to create variation. We won't be going step by step through an entire project, but rather talk in broad terms about some of the best ways to work and options you have for dealing with issues that may come up. Before we start, I recommend you have experience using MARI as we cover a lot of information in a shorter span of time. If you’re an artist new to MARI, I recommend you check out Establishing a Solid Foundation in MARI first. From there you can look at the intermediate step-by-step project based courses that will take you through the entire process.

Creating highly detailed textures for our characters can often be a difficult task. MARI gives us a lot of flexibility in creating those textures and allows us to break down our models into a large number of high resolution textures that we can paint on simultaneously. In this series of lessons we will go through the process of using MARI to create textures for high resolution creatures. We will begin by setting up our MARI project, with our geometry and texture channels, and setting up the workspace. From there, we will block in a color base on the pieces of our model. We will look at the different effects we can get when using different brushes. We will use photographic images to paint through, adding realistic detail to the model very quickly. We will also look at several ways that we can use masking to aid in texturing, including edge masking and using existing channels as masks. Finally, we will look at how to adjust entire channels or selected uv patches based on a number of different filters. In the end, you will not only have textured a complete project, but you will have the tools you need to create high resolution textures on your own models. If you are just starting out and are completely new to MARI, please check out the Beginner Guide to MARI as well as the Introduction to MARI to get a good grip on all of the functionality available in this powerful application.

In this course we will be giving you an introductory look into MARI so you can learn essential terms and definitions and start to build a solid foundation in this powerful texturing application. We will start off by covering the basics of MARI- working with projects and looking at the interface. We will then take a look at some key concepts in MARI, like projection painting and the paint buffer. After that, you will learn about channels and shaders and how to use masking to get the best texturing results. And to wrap up, we will look at how you can export your finished texture maps. This series of step-by-step videos was developed with artists new to MARI in mind so we will be moving at a steady, easy-to-follow pace making sure you understand terms and basic techniques. To view more Beginner Guide courses; visit our library where you will find the largest collection of free, high-quality CG training videos.

Creating textures for our models can sometimes be difficult, but it is often so important for bringing those models to life within our projects. Born out of necessity within the film industry, MARI is a terrific solution for painting textures and will allow us to work with large objects with multiple texture maps seamlessly. In this series of lessons we will take you through the many facets of MARI so you start creating textures for your own models right away. We will begin by talking about how to work with MARI projects. We will get accustomed to the MARI interface and let you know how you can customize it to fit your own needs. From there, we will talk about vital topics like working with the paint buffer and how MARI works with multiple uv patches. We will explore the tools you can use to paint on your models, including customizing brushes and tool properties. We will cover the topic of projection painting and look at some of the projection settings that will allow you to get better results. We will also look at cloning and painting through existing photographic images to help you create great texture maps. We will use photographic images to paint through, adding realistic detail to the model very quickly. We will explore channels and shaders, and working with multiple objects, using filters to modify textures, and a lot more. In the end, you will be able start using MARI to paint great textures for your own models. If you are just starting out and maybe you're fairly new to 3D. You can also go through The Beginner Guide to MARI, which will give you a quick overview of the functionality of MARI and some of the things to expect when using it.

This course will begin by discussing the basic workflow of projecting texture detail onto your geometry within MARI as well as important features and settings that you will want to be aware of at an early stage of your texturing process. From there, we will move into important topics such as mirroring painted details from one side of your geometry to the other, utilizing a multi-layered approach when creating our textures in MARI, looking at methods for seamlessly blending our textures together, as well as many additional tips, tricks, and techniques that you will be able to use within your own MARI projects.