MARI Integration and Maya/MARI Round-Trip Workflow

Unlock your texture artists’ workflow with the latest Shotgun integration – MARI. Through close work with our friends at the Foundry as well as a number of our insightful client studios to identify best practices, we’re pleased to announce that we now offer MARI integration in Pipeline Toolkit, which includes a Maya/MARI round-trip that connects modeling, textures, and lookdev. It’s a major step forward in our continuing efforts to supply your team with the building blocks you need for a complete end-to-end pipeline.

Expanding Workflow Possibilities

The full suite of our Pipeline Toolkit apps are ready to go in MARI. Texture artists can now quickly create a new MARI project from the latest model, publish via the Shotgun Loader app, and paint instantly. As other artists on the team make updates that affect their work, the Breakdown app is there to swap them in seamlessly. Sharing textures has never been easier as the Publish app automatically exports them in a pipeline-friendly way, with names and formats you choose as well as the option to archive if desired. Because our MARI engine also tracks metadata within the application, the links between Shotgun and each MARI project are maintained behind the scenes so everything your artists create stays organized and accounted for. Finally, Maya support in both directions enables you to push out models for MARI work and load textures back in for lookdev with the click of a button.

Jack Greasley, MARI Product Manager at The Foundry, said, “The Foundry and Shotgun share a strong commitment to improving the experience of all of our clients, and it's great to be able to make processes more efficient for them by integrating the tools they use every day. With Shotgun’s native support for MARI we’re streamlining a process that’s very common for texture artists in film and commercial work by enabling them to snapshot and publish files directly from within MARI."

Thanks to the Shotgun Community

The MARI engine is another gold star for our amazing Shotgun pipeline community. Huge thanks go out to Tim Chauncey and Daragh Casey at Windmill Lane VFX in Dublin, Ireland, the team that kickstarted the MARI integration and shared it back with us and the rest of the community at large. We remain in awe of all the work our clients get through and love to see collaborations like this become official releases!

More on the Way

The full power of MARI has much to offer and this is just the beginning of our integration. We’d love to hear more about how you work with MARI and how we can do more to enhance your creativity. What would you like to see next?

As with all of our pipeline code, source is available on Github.

MARI integration is available now and included as part of your Shotgun subscription. As always, email us at toolkitsupport@shotgunsoftware.com with any questions, suggestions, or feature requests.

Find out more in our Mari docs and sign up for a free trial at shotgunsoftware.com/signup.