Rhythm & Hues Adopts The Foundry’s MARI

London, UK – Visual effects software developer The Foundry [1] announced that Rhythm & Hues [2] has adopted MARI [3] as its primary paint tool. Using MARI will give the studio’s artists freedom to focus on being creative without having to spend time worrying about time-consuming processes like file management.

“Before we started using MARI artists had to work with large Photoshop files in BodyPaint and go back and forth between the two programs,” commented Angela Frame, Texture Department Supervisor at Rhythm & Hues. “Now with MARI, the artists can spend most of their time painting. They have found MARI quite user-friendly and easy to pick up so they can now paint production assets in a short amount of time. With MARI handling the complexities of texture management is so much easier, allowing us to work smarter and push textures out quicker.”

Rhythm & Hues is already using MARI on a number of projects in production including RIPD, Seventh Son, and Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters. Going forward, Rhythm & Hues will use MARI on all new shows.

“We are excited that Rhythm & Hues have decided to use MARI as its 3D paint and texturing tool,” commented Jack Greasley, MARI Product Manager at The Foundry. “I have been working with them for some time to help them to understand just how powerful and flexible MARI is. It literally breaks off the shackles of monotonous procedures and lets artists get down to being truly creative.”

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 capable of handling vast numbers of pixels. It allows artists to concentrate on painting detailed, multi-layered textures directly onto 3D models in a fluid and natural way.

“It was the perfect time for us to adopt MARI. We have several shows in production that require the texture painters to work on large and challenging models,” Frame said. “MARI gives us the ability to see our textures on a complete model, paint large textures in real time, and set up preview shaders that give us a closer approximation to the final result. All of this was not doable with our old way of working.”

MARI 1.4v3 was released in March 2012 and is used extensively by cutting-edge artists at a variety of major film studios and post production houses worldwide. A new version of MARI will be launching this summer.

Source: The Foundry