Mari is a brand new creative 3D texture painting product originally developed at Weta Digital and now productised by The Foundry, to handle the exceedingly detailed look development and texture work demanded by Avatar.
Mari has been enthusiastically received across a variety of texture painting communities. This decision by Double Negative and Framestore to invest while the product is still in beta and set Mari to work on live projects is testament to quality of the product and hunger for development in this area of work.
The Foundry have also received advance orders on a smaller scale from studios worldwide including BaseBlack in London and Fido in Sweden.
Matt Holben, CEO, Double Negative, said: “Development in the world of texture painting has been somewhat stilted in recent years, hence Weta’s development of Mari. We are all facing increasing demands in terms of scale and detail as new formats become the norm. Mari is what our artists have been waiting for. We have been employing it on production since alpha and are confident we are making the right move purchasing this software – even pre-release.”
Christophe Meslin, Head of Systems Support, Framestore, said: “Our artists are very excited by Mari and are already using it on live projects. Mari has been developed with our whole workflow in mind and hence frees up the artists to do what they do best – paint.”
Bill Collis, CEO, The Foundry, chimed in with the following: “We are very excited about Mari and this just proves that excitement is well founded. Developed on production, it delivers in real-life production situations and that is why people like it so much. With Mari on Linux due for release this month and a Windows build not far away, we look forward to bringing this truly useful, creative toolset to texture artists across a variety of industries.”
