Hi everyone! Welcome to the first part of this Mari's beginner course.
Make sure you've grabbed all the training downloads from the course page.
Mari is great for creating bespoke painted textures, so today we'll be painting a camera from start to finish.
I'm using Mari 4.6v3, but the workflow we're using can be followed in earlier versions of Mari 4, and Mari non-commercial.
When you launch Mari you're presented with the Project screen.
This is where all your Mari projects are listed and you'll be able to access them by double-clicking them.
We're going to create our project by either clicking "New" at the bottom of the projects tab or pressing CTRL + N.
A new project window opens with four tabs along the top.
We're not going to look at "Color Settings" or "Lighting" today because the default settings in those tabs are going to suit us just fine for this project.
Controlling your color space settings and lighting setup might be something you need to look more into in the future, so I recommend checking out Michael Wilde's Fundamentals course which covers it.
We're going to focus on the "Geometry" and "Channels" tabs.
The "Geometry" tab is where we're going to define the paths to the geometry we want to paint in Mari.
Click the "Pick Mesh" button and navigate to the Lubitel camera .OBJ you downloaded from the course page.
Click "Open" and you'll be presented with some mesh options here in the geometry tab.
The default settings here are going to suit our needs for this project.
Shortly we will be creating our own selection groups for our objects in Mari which is going to make painting our camera a lot simpler, so you can keep this option as default.
A selection group is a group of faces or polygons that can be selected together automatically to make operations on these specific faces a lot quicker and easier.
For example you might want to select a specific set of polygons in order to paint a logo onto those polygons only.
You typically find this functionality in many 3D applications.
In Mari you can add or remove selection groups through the "Selection Group" palette.
Sometimes you may have setup selection groups for your objects in another 3D application, so using the "Create From Face Group" option allows you to import those groups.
The "Channels" tab might look a bit daunting at first but all it does is provide us with a series of shader presets that we can choose from,
and then a selection of preset channels that are going to be automatically hooked up to our shader if we choose to enable them.
A channel simply takes the texture data we paint into it and feeds it into our shader.
Shaders allow Mari to specify how different channels behave under different lighting conditions so we need to select one to view our object with.
A shader is something that contains all the instructions on how to draw something to the screen but it doesn't know what you want to draw.
So when we hook up channels to our shader we're channeling the texture information from the channel into the shader so it knows what it should be drawing.
We have several to choose from here because each one draws its channels differently.
For our project select "Principled BRDF - Metallic - Games" from the "Category" drop-down.
The great thing about Principled BRDF is the channel names clearly explain what they are.
For example, the Metallic channel allows you to specify whether material is metal or not.
As you can see once we select that category, it changes the channel "Sizes" and "Depths" to ensure that textures we eventually bake out from those channels in Mari are more suitable for game engines.
This is going to help performance a little with our first Mari project because the texture sizes are a bit smaller than the VFX category option.
The reason why we're selecting the metallic version of the shader instead of the non-metallic is because when we look at our camera reference there are clearly metallic parts that we want to represent in our textures.
Selecting Metallic is going to add a metallic channel onto our shader that allows us to control whether something is metallic or not on our object.
You can also create channels while you're working inside Mari, which is typical in a production environment, so for now let's only select the "Base Colour" channel.
This is the channel will begin painting into and it's where we will paint all of our diffuse colors so we know for sure that we're going to need it.
The other channels we're going to create as we work in Mari, since right now we don't know exactly which of these channels we're going to need.
Potentially we might not need any of these and there's no point in creating a lot of channels that will end up being unused.
It's best practice to create channels as you work because this keeps your project neater and a bit more under control.
Give the project any name you like in the "Project Name" field then click "Create New Project" as we're ready to get into Mari.
In Mari, open up the "Objects" palette.
You can click and drag the palette and dock it into the UI.
This is where you can manage the objects in your scene, so for example I can show and hide the geometry we set up during the new project process.
This palette is really useful if you need to import new versions of your geometry by right-clicking the objects in the palette and selecting add version.
For example, you might need to tweak the UVs on your objects and bring it back into Mari.
Your object versions will appear in this version drop-down.
Before we begin painting let's quickly go over a few items in the UI so you can navigate Mari a bit more confidently.
We'll cover more of the UI as the course goes along but you can also check out Michael Wilde's Fundamentals course if you want to go more in depth right away.
This is our Perspective viewport and you can change to different viewports using the tabs along the top.
I found that the "Ortho UV" and "Ortho" viewports are the most suitable for working in but you may discover you prefer other viewports as you become more familiar with painting in Mari.
I really like the Ortho UV viewport because when it comes to selecting and painting in Mari sometimes it's helpful to work directly with the UVs.
So this gives us a view where we can see our object updating in 3D orthographic space while we work on our UVs.
Right-clicking in the viewport and selecting"Display Properties" allows you to access the display settings for the viewport.
I've turned off the grid and changed the background color slightly for better visibility.
Holding ALT and clicking rotates the camera.
Holding CTRL + R and left-clicking lets you tilt the camera, which becomes very useful when you've rotated the camera off center.
Holding ALT + SHIFT and clicking lets you pan the camera.
You can zoom in and out of your canvas by simply scrolling your mouse wheel.
If you find that any of these hotkeys are not working as expected for you, go into Edit > Shortcuts and open the tools navigation menu.
You'll get a list of all your camera shortcuts here to make note of or change if you need to.
You can also change your control type in the navigation preferences to another applications navigations presets if it's something you feel more comfortable and familiar with.
There's also a set of preset front, back, left, right, top, and bottom camera views that you can access by hitting the number keys along the top of your keyboard.
The bottom right help text will become more helpful as you begin to use the tools in Mari.
It feeds you information about the currently selected objects, tools, channels, and layers.
Refer to as you work to ensure that you have the properly selected items.
You can edit what's displayed in the help text by going to Edit > HUD manager and selecting or deselecting items.
For example you might want to see the frame rate in your viewport so you can turn on "FPS" in the Canvas section.
Next we'll look at setting up some selection groups from our camera and then we can get painting.
See you in the next episode!