I’ve just completed another CG Society 8 week course. This time it was “Realistic Character Texture Painting in Mari 2.0”. This course is given by Justin Holt currently working at Image Engine. His IMDB entry is here.

In this course we learn the techniques of texturing a hero character for film. Similar to the Environmental texturing course I took earlier, the texture sizes are huge. However this time I had Mari, not Photoshop, as my main tool. Mari was developed by Weta Digital for use in the Avatar movie and is a purpose built texture painting application for the film and game industry.

Texture painting in Mari is awesome. Mari has most of the familiar settings you are use to from Photoshop.

To render the final image you see below I used Cycles which is part of the Blender3d application. Justin used Arnold for his render and others on the course used v-ray however those require commercial licenses and I don’t have the spare cash at the moment.

One BIG limitation in using Blender3d is that it does not support the UDIM texture space used in Mari and other commercial 3D apps. This was a real blow as Blender only supports a single texture square. I thought I’d never see a render of this character as this was a show stopper. However The Foundry just released Mari 2.6 which has a feature for transferring texture channels from one UV layout to another. This was all I needed to transfer the many UDIM patches in the Drow Elf model to a single patch suitable for use with Blender3d!

When it came to rendering the trickiest part was figuring out how to use the Sub-Surface Scattering (SSS) material node correctly in Cycles.

Here is the model we were given at the start of the course. We had to come up with a paint concept and execute it during the course.

This is my final render.