Geo-Channels
Mari 4.6v1 extends the Material System to include Geo-Channels, allowing for material looks to be driven by mesh maps like AO and Curvature. Geo-Channels are slots on objects for storing named, mesh specific texture maps. Either imported from disk or exported from the project via Channels, the Modo Bake Presets and Bake Points. Geo-Channel Nodes and Layers display the texture map of any Geo-Channel by choosing its name, allowing you to dynamically inject your mesh maps directly to the Node Graph or Layerstack. The new Sync on Bake options in Mari's Bake Point node, lets you share the results of a graph network across your current project. Geo-Channels can be used as an intermediate caching point to allow complex node sharing without the hard to navigate spaghetti of shared connections in the Node Graph. Geo Channel has new Base Color parameter for the base color, which the Geo Channel texture values are blended on top of.
Collapsible Nodes
With the Material System, we’re encouraging you to take advantage of Mari’s incredibly powerful Node Graph for material designing. So we’ve been taking steps to improve the user experience. All Mari nodes are now collapsable, with three states: expanded, collapsed and connected only. These can be cycled by either clicking the new button on the right of every node’s title bar, or by using the ~ shortcut while nodes are selecting nodes. These new collapsed states give you fine tuned flexibility to reduce the visual clutter of complex graphs, making the Mari Node Graph easier to read and navigate. The Multi-Channel nodes that power Mari’s Material System, have an additional Stream Collapsed mode. When all stream are connected in parallel to a downstream node, the connections will appear as a single blue edge. This drastically reduces visual clutter by reducing the size of the tall Multi-Channel nodes introduced in Mari 4.5.
Multi-Channel Stream Collapsed Nodes
The Multi-Channel nodes that power Mari’s Material System, have an additional Stream Collapsed mode. When all stream are connected in parallel to a downstream node, the connections will appear as a single blue edge. This drastically reduces visual clutter by reducing the size of the tall Multi-Channel nodes introduced in Mari 4.5.
Improved Node Auto-Placement
Mari’s node auto-layout logic has been replaced with a new method where upstream nodes are arranged in visual columns with merge nodes forming a visual backbone. This new method should increase the readability of large merge node chains and complex networks.
Customize Material Thumbnails
It is now possible for you to customize your material preset icon generation to conform to your desired standard of material art asset display. Geometry, Camera, Environment Light and Geo-Channels can now all be set in the new Mari Preferences > Thumbnail tab.
Custom Ingest Material Templates
With the introduction of Material Ingest Template Materials, you can now increase the complexity of your ingested Materials with customized promoted controls and user driven sub graph networks. Allowing for a more bespoke automated Material creation workflow.
Material Ingest Search Results
Material Ingest Tool users can now validate your search parameters without running the full material creation process. A table of PBR texture set search results can be displayed based on the parameters set in the tool.
New Vendor Shaders
As Mari’s Material System is driven by the inputs of your project’s shader, it has become more beneficial to have Mari approximations of the render engine shaders your textures are destined for, in order to design materials for your render engine of choice. Mari 4.6 brings two more render vendor contributed approximation shaders to Mari.
V-Ray Shader
The legacy V-Ray shader has been replaced by a new shader from the Chaos Group team behind V-Ray 2019. Artists that use the V-Ray render engine can now paint textures in Mari with a higher degree of confidence that your art will look correct in your final render.
3Delight Shader
A new 3Delight shader has been contributed to Mari by the 3Delight team. With the introduction of the 3Delight Surface shader, you can now paint textures in Mari that will give an approximation of the 3Delight render engine result. Making it easier to iterate lookdev between Mari and Katana.