Mari 4.5 with Mari Materials System is released

Foundry has recently released Mari 4.5 with a transformative Materials System that allows artists to create high-volume assets faster and more cost-effectively.

This new workflow enables artists to rapidly block out the look of an asset using material presets, and achieve the same result with just a few drag-and-drop actions.

In addition, Mari 4.5 allows artists to quickly import and use thousands of Physically Based Rendering texture sets with the Material Ingest Tool. This creates the presets, sets up the controls, and loads everything into Mari so it’s ready to use, allowing artists to continually grow their material library. Sharing isolated material set-ups across teams is also easier and reduces the amount of repetitive set-up required, as everything needed to replicate the material gets compressed, along with source images, into a single file.

Other additions brought by Mari 4.5 are simple layering (artists are able to control the material properties, visibility of each component, and global material visibility, from a single area of the interface for their entire project), material grouping (a group with multi-channel layer behaviors that allows artists to apply adjustments to material streams independently of the rest of the layers in the channel), a new Arnold shader provided by Autodesk and an updated node graph UX that supports multiple output ports for additional arbitrary data streams, unlocking more complex workflows.

More information about Mari 4.5 you can find here and full release notes here