The Foundry bridges Nuke with creative paint and texture tool Mari

London - Visual effects software developer The Foundry is shipping the latest version of its creative paint and texture tool - Mari 1.3 v2.

“Nuke compositors who need to be able to paint or modify projections for their 3D models and environments will benefit the most from this workflow. Right now to repaint in Nuke you’re limited to 2D paint. Our new workflow gives you access to Mari’s tailored tool set and allows you to paint directly in a 3D environment,” said Nuke product manager Jon Wadelton.

The Foundry’s Mari 1.3v2 delivers a focused workflow to provide Nuke artists with dedicated 3D paint tools, that make digital environment and projection work more efficient and final composited scenes more believable. The new Nuke-Mari bridge creates an intuitive workflow between two of The Foundry’s leading visual effects software products.

Mari offers the best possible interface and toolset for creating and editing 3D textures. Nuke artists can now access the benefits of Mari the moment they need dedicated paint tools, keeping context of the models, cameras and projections in their compositing scene. By bridging the two toolsets artists immediately benefit from applying the most appropriate tools to the task. This frees them to concentrate on creative and accurate work and removes the pain of manual round-trip and data management, which is now automatically handled for them in the background.

“A Nuke, Mari combination workflow is saving me 20 to 30 percent of my time creating clean plates” said Brandon Fayette, CG Supervisor and production lead, Bad Robot. “I’ve already completed 14 shots this way and I am really happy with the results.” Brandon has been using a similar workflow for matte paintings; “Combining compositing, 3D modelling and texture painting in the same workflow is just amazing”.

Simple to set up and easy to use, with the Nuke-Mari bridge models, projections and images are sent from Nuke to Mari and back in a single step, or over a network when artists need to collaborate, share skills or save time. The bridge also provides a better integration of digital environments and matte paintings – artists can address common and time-consuming challenges faced when using projection techniques to build digital environments:

• Manage reference photography and paint seamless 3D projections.

• Easily fix warping and stretching artefacts.

• In-paint holes and occluded areas, often exposed from adjusted camera views.

• Remove unwanted markers and scene objects.

• Build invisible set-extensions.

Access to the full Nuke and Mari toolset, each dedicated to the task – gives the artists the best tools and workflow combined, to achieve the best quality results in the shortest time.

Mari 1.3 is available on Linux and Windows. Mari 1.3 is priced at US$1,980/ £1,200.