The Foundry’s Mari continues to get a foothold in the industry as a brilliant texture painting software. Version 1.5 offers shadows and Photoshop brush support as part of its continuing evolution for high-end VFX. The  big news is that The Foundry’s highly touted texture painting software has recently made inroads at Rhythm & Hues, Laika, and LucasArts (where it’s a fixture in the upcoming Star Wars 1313 game).

Kim Libreri, Visual Effects supervisor, Industrial Light & Magic/LucasArts comments: “Integrating Mari at LucasArts for Star Wars 1313 helped us work a lot more efficiently and contributed to making the game visually stunning. Mari allows us to create more realistic assets using techniques similar to those we use at ILM for our movies. It’s also been a real benefit that the texture artists are able to preview assets in real-time so they can interact with them and see exactly how they are going to look in-game.”

As well as the addition of games shaders, improved Overlapping UV Support gives artists the freedom of a smooth and robust workflow allowing shared textures to be re-used across 3D models within the same UV space.

Helping to improve interoperability with Autodesk Maya artists can now seamlessly handle patch based textures with a single click using the new Maya Texture Export feature.

Shadow Support lets artists cast real-time shadows on objects from multiple light sources. This brand new functionality allows users to effortlessly see the impact of dramatic lighting on their textures.

DDS Cubemap Support means artists can accurately match the final look of real time assets, and new Mirroring Support in Mari’s paint buffer has been added so Mari users can get results fast and take control of symmetrical objects at any stage of the creative process.