Leading visual effects software developer The Foundry has announced the release of MARI 1.4. Designed from the ground up to meet the needs of the most demanding VFX texture and matte painting artists, MARI is a 3D digital paint tool that simplifies artist workflow.

Capable of handling vast numbers of pixels, MARI eclipses other 3D paint tools in speed, flexibility and processing capabilities. MARI allows artists to concentrate on painting detailed, multi-layered textures directly onto 3D models in a fluid and natural way.

Introducing Adobe® Photoshop layered PSD import and export, industry standard colour management with OpenColorIO and triplanar projection, MARI 1.4 speeds up and simplifies workflow.  With MARI 1.4 artists can paint detailed, multi-layered textures directly onto 3D models, solve commonplace VFX problems, save time, and work in ways never thought possible before.

Originally developed to cope with the most ambitious VFX films of our time and enhanced by The Foundry, MARI easily fits into your current pipeline and will adapt to deliver on often unforeseen production requirements.

In the past year MARI has quickly become the new high end standard for digital paint. It has been widely adopted across the industry at leading film studios and post production houses including Sony Picture Imageworks, DreamWorks, Industrial Light & Magic, Pixar and Digital Domain to name a few.

Hayden Jones, VFX Supervisor at Rushes said “Using MARI to paint was a revelation! It’s immensely quick and intuitive. MARI allowed me to concentrate on the getting the artistic look right, without having to get bogged down in technicalities.”

Trey Harrell, the Lighting Supervisor at Mr. X said “We were also one of the first studios in the world to adopt MARI into our pipeline, which proved crucial due to the enormous texture resolution requirements on many of our assets.”

Rob Bredow, Chief Technology Officer at Sony Picture Imageworks adds “MARI streamlines our artist workflows on our most complicated assets. It is the latest addition to our pipeline as we provide artists with the right, innovative tools to meet any creative challenge.”

Bill Collis, Chief Executive Officer at The Foundry comments, “The progress of MARI over the past year has been impressive. Our aim is for MARI to continue development and handle all aspects of high-end digital paint, this latest release brings us that much closer. MARI’s growing customer base reinforces that MARI is quickly being adopted as the industry standard.”

MARI 1.4 is available immediately and runs on Windows and Linux. It supports Ptex, Python OpenEXR, and C API. MARI 1.4 is priced at $1,980/ £1,200 with maintenance costing $330/£200.

For more information and for video demos of MARI 1.4 see:

www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/mari