Over the course of my time at EGG and for my modelling and texturing work for Screen Scene I've been able to dive into Mari full time in a production environment. I don't often offer views on software as they're mainly tools and everything you can do in one you can normally do in another. However for Mari, I did a lot of reading on it before I started and I can't remember where but one artist had written for quick textures, use Mudbox, for high end textures Mari is the only way to go. This is a sentiment I find myself agreeing with more and more. For a number of projects there was no locked off idea of where on screen the assets were going to sit so everything was painted with hero textures, full 8k or 16k textures or lots of UDIMS. Mari handles these huge textures so easily that it makes absolutely no difference in workflow.
There are still a few things that would be on my wish list, a proper Maya plugin for full integration (or at least an option to export flattened channels in Maya's native UDIM format), the ability to re-project painted details onto another mesh or the same mesh with different uvs and the ability to read alembic for animated meshes would be a nice plus. Having said that in terms of ease of use, non destructive workflow and ability to work with huge numbers of variations, Mari is second to none. If anyone would find it useful I'll record a video showing my both my workflow from Maya to Mari and back and also my typical Mari techniques and whatnot. Let me now via email or through the contact form.
There are still a few things that would be on my wish list, a proper Maya plugin for full integration (or at least an option to export flattened channels in Maya's native UDIM format), the ability to re-project painted details onto another mesh or the same mesh with different uvs and the ability to read alembic for animated meshes would be a nice plus. Having said that in terms of ease of use, non destructive workflow and ability to work with huge numbers of variations, Mari is second to none. If anyone would find it useful I'll record a video showing my both my workflow from Maya to Mari and back and also my typical Mari techniques and whatnot. Let me now via email or through the contact form.