Mari 7.5 Beta: Revolutionizing Texture Painting with Multi-Paint
Foundry has opened the beta for Mari 7.5, the new version of its 3D painting software, with improvements specifically designed for VFX artists, video games, and professional texturing 🎨. The update introduces highly anticipated features by the community, with the Multi-Paint system standing out, which allows painting or projecting images simultaneously on up to eight different texture channels. This innovation eliminates the need to work channel by channel, dramatically accelerating the creative process and giving artists unprecedented control over materials and textures. Because in modern production, efficiency is not an option, it is a necessity 💡.
Multi-Paint: The Heart of Texturing Productivity
The central feature of Mari 7.5 is the new Multi-Paint system, which allows working simultaneously on up to eight texture channels such as diffuse, specular, bump, roughness, and more 🖌️. All of Mari's painting buffer tools—Paint, Clone Stamp, Blur, Warp, Slerp—have been adapted to work with this system, allowing artists to apply complex changes across multiple channels with a single action. This not only significantly reduces working time but also facilitates visual consistency between different material maps, something crucial for high-end projects.
Multi-Paint allows painting or projecting images simultaneously on up to eight different texture channels, eliminating the need to work channel by channel.
Improvements in Image Management and Texture Transfer
The Image Manager has been completely redesigned to support image groups instead of static tabs, making it easier to drag entire groups to the Multi-Paint palette. This reorganization makes texture asset management more intuitive and efficient. At the same time, the Bakery tool is improved with the new Texture Transfer system, which allows transferring textures and node graphs between objects with different UV mappings in a more automatic and precise way, reducing repetitive work in complex pipelines 🗂️.
Stability and Project Recovery
Mari 7.5 beta includes significant improvements in the automatic backup and project recovery system. New backup labeling options are added, menus reorganized by dates for easier access, and reduced loading times when restoring projects from backups or autosaves. These improvements are particularly valuable for studios handling large projects where work loss can be costly, ensuring that artists can recover their progress quickly after unforeseen events 💾.
Availability and Compatibility
The beta version is available to users with an active Mari license. The software maintains its subscription scheme, with different prices for individual users and teams, and is compatible with Windows 10+, Linux (recent distributions like RHEL/Rocky Linux), and previous standard requirements. Foundry has not announced a definitive date for the final version, but the open beta suggests that the official release might be near, giving the community time to test and provide feedback on the new features 🌐.
The Irony of Texturing Productivity
With so many different channels to paint at the same time, your brushes will be more multitasking than you on Monday mornings... though you'll probably still need coffee to match their pace ☕.