Mari 4.5v2 Release Notes

Release Date

12 July 2019

System Requirements

Officially Supported Operating Systems

• Windows 7 64-bit or higher
• Linux 64-bit operating system (CentOS/RHEL 6)

Minimum Hardware Requirements

• Quad-core processor
• 10+ GB disk space available for caching and temporary files
• At least 4 GB RAM
• Display with 1680 x 1050 pixel resolution
• An NVIDIA or AMD* graphics card with the latest drivers
• 1 GB of graphics memory
• OpenGL 3.2* or higher

*Displacement preview is currently only available on the cards and drivers that support OpenGL 4.0 or newer.

Recommended System Requirements

• 2.5+ Ghz Quad-core processor
• 250+ GB disk space available for caching and temporary files. SSD is preferable.
• 16 GB RAM with additional virtual memory*
• Display with 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution
• An NVIDIA or AMD* graphics card with the latest drivers
• 2+ GB of graphics memory
• OpenGL 4.4 or higher support

*The use of virtual memory improves stability and helps prevent data loss on large projects.

'Recommended' does not guarantee that it meets your particular needs.

Tested Hardware

The configurations listed below are those that The Foundry have tested with Mari. Due to the constantly changing nature and wide variety of computer hardware available in the market, The Foundry is unable to officially certify hardware. The list below can be used as a recommendation and does not guarantee that it meets your particular needs.

Please download and install the latest graphics driver from the NVIDIA or AMD websites, and ensure that you are using 8.982.1 drivers or higher for AMD cards.

If you encounter any issues, please contact Customer Support directly through the Support Portal at the following address: https://support.foundry.com.

Tested Workstation Hardware

Tested GPU Hardware

New Features

There are no new features in this release.

Feature Enhancements

There are no feature enhancements in this release.

Bug Fixes

• ID 378782 - Opening the Select Color dialog with certain custom colorspace configurations would cause Mari to crash.

• ID 394852 - Export Flattened > Export Current Channel Flattened would ignore the Small Textures option when exporting uniform images from a selected Channel.

• ID 394801 - When a projects OCIO config was over ridden by the OCIO environment variable the colorspaces of the projects channels and images would not reset correctly to their default values.

• ID 374433 - When working in the Node Graph disconnecting a secondary Viewer input switched the current view to the disconnected input.

• ID 394903 - Mari incorrectly displayed a warning message when changing the color picking colorspace.

• ID 395051 - When choosing a color value that was outside of the range defined for the color picking colorspace of the current OCIO config, Mari failed to display a warning to the user and would clamp the corresponding value in the color picker to reflect the true value baked into the texture.

• ID 397104 - When using the towbrush tool on semi-transparent regions some areas would appear overly saturated.

• ID 357554 - Mari would fail to warn the user when the choosen Color Picking colorspace would clamp the values due to limitations in the OCIOtransform.

• ID 382676 - Some customOCIO configs would cause incorrect data, in the R, G, B components, when painting into 8-bit scalar Channels.

• ID 380507 - The Clone stamp, Blur, Gradient and Paint Through tools would give incorrect results when color management was disabled.

• ID 387802 - The Mari Online Help Install > Installing on Windows section has been updated to specify that the command line /silent flag for silent installation has been replaced with /S for silent and /D for the install destination.

• ID 368809 - Texture Transfer would incorrectly fail with the "Image sets must contain images of the same size" error.

• ID 387529 - Using the Towbrush would cause Mari to crash.

• ID 381023 - Loading alembic files with multiple geometries would create a large log file.

• ID 387320 - Material thumbnails were generated in the incorrect colorspace when a non-default color config was specified.

• ID 384194 - Mari would overwrite a non-writable file when archiving a project on Linux

• ID 390374 - Sharing a layer would not respect the bit depth of the Channel for determining the blending color space.

• ID 367105 - Sliders with initial values of zero and minimum values below zero had their handles incorrectly positioned inside the slider range.

• ID 390108 - The Arnold Standard Surface shaders bump and normal mapping displayed incorrectly.

• ID 378934 - When creating a new 16/32-bit channel the intial Base layer would have the Colorspace Blending option set to Enabled. Subsequent layers created in the channel would have theirs set to Disabled.

• ID 376881 - When using the clone stamp tool texture corruption would sometimes occur in the paint buffer.

• ID 393864 - Painting vectors in world space displayed patch seams.

• ID 393648 - The group node Pick Knobs to Add dialog showed the hidden attributes of nested nodes.

• ID 384072 - Material ingestion failed when attempting to link non-existent node attributes.

• ID 382901 - The view transform had no affect on the background gradient and image.

• ID 373673 - Disconnecting a multi-channel node from another multi-channel node would remove the connections of other nodes in the same input group. Additionally, inserting a node into a multi-channel stream would disconnect the sibling streams.

• ID 371935 - Adding a material, from the shelf to the layerstack, below the bottom-most layer created the material on top of the stack.

• ID 386897 - Bake Point Nodes downstream of a Group Node would not be correctly updated when a node within the Group Node changed.

• ID 382801 - The light color attributes dTP not respect color management.

• ID 386988 - When picking from the Colors palette Blend tab, the color picked dTP not match the color displayed.

• ID 387743 - Selecting the Layer Mask > Add Mask > From Selection Group option filled the selected layer incorrectly.

• ID 386200 - Moving multiple selected layers to the position of the top of the selected layers would unexpectedly swap the order of the selected layers

• ID 370228 - Exporting a material dTP not restore the user shader.

• ID 393599 - Cubemaps generated from HDR environment lights gave noisy results at lower resolutions.

• ID 386775 - When a Multi-Channel group was nested within a Multi-Channel Group, flattening the inner Multi-Channel Group layer and ungrouping the outer one left Multi-Channel Bottom Transparency nodes in the Node Graph.

• ID 385567 - All layers in 8-bit scalar channels would have their Colorspace Blending option set to Enabled which would mean all blending would be incorrectly applied in a non-linear way.

• ID 385568 - Some transparent textures would result in the incorrect results when used in tools such as paint through.

• ID 386714 - Reopening certain non-material archives would cause Mari to crash.

• ID 391218 - Picking a NaN from the color picker would cause Mari to crash.

• ID 383320 - Converting a Material node would stack up underlying nodes in the same position.

• ID 380742 - Picked colors would display the incorrect RGB values in the pixel analyzer.

• ID 386839 - The Principled BRDF shader's Sheen property was unaffected by the environment light.

• ID 385229 - Importing a session loaded duplicate images.

• ID 378830 - Results baked down would not match the original preview when source grade was used.

• ID 386866 - The toggle brush action would switch to an invalTP brush tip if executed before selecting another brush

• ID 386774 - Ungrouping Multi-Channel group layer with content left Multi-Channel Bottom Transparency nodes in the Node Graph.

• ID 383613 - Auto-extension of Multi-Channel streams incorrectly set the blending colorspace property for Multi-Channel Merge nodes in the extended stream.

• ID 382993 - Alpha would still be applied when using the view transform option to view single components R, G, B, A, of an image in the image preview.

• ID 386450 - Using Smart Select's Connectedness UV mode after using Connectedness Mesh mode incorrectly selected face elements when in UV connection mode.

Known Issues

Graphics Cards

• ID 207913 - Mari may crash, or operate with lower than expected performance, when using recent graphics drivers with some AMD cards.
There have been reports that Plays.tv and Raptr, which come bundled with the AMD FirePro drivers, can cause instability in Mari. If you are experiencing instability, please try uninstalling these applications.

• ID 16225 / BZ 18457 - Using NVIDIA graphics cards from the Fermi series with drivers older than version 270 results in various rendering issues when the Virtual Texture Type is set to Half or Float.
To resolve this, please download and install the latest graphics driver for your card from the NVIDIA website.

• ID 9404 / BZ 12567 - Enabling Sync to VBlank in NVIDIA settings can drastically reduce Mari’s performance. If you experience very slow interaction, even with low-polygon models, on one of the Tested Workstation Hardware, navigate to:

• Linux: NVIDIA X Server Settings > X Screen 0 > OpenGL Settings and turn off Sync to VBlank.

• Windows: NVIDIA Control Panel > 3D Settings > Manage 3DSettings > Vertical Sync > Force off

Then, restart Mari.

Importing And Exporting

• ID 123514 / BZ 50886 - Imported shaders don't have channels assigned.

• ID 113036 / BZ 49131 - High polygon .obj files, exported using the OBJ Exporter plug-in, cannot be read back in to Mari.

• ID 57756 / BZ 29386 - When using the Export for Maya script, Maya’s viewport may incorrectly show some patches as transparent. This can be resolved by selecting High Quality Rendering or Viewport 2.0 from the Renderer menu within Maya.

• ID 10157 / BZ 16324 - Windows only: You cannot currently import an image into a channel using a relative file path. To work around this, use an absolute path when importing images.

• ID 9854 / BZ 14985 - There may be a slight pause after importing textures when creating new projects, while Mari saves the project.

Layers

• ID 383360 - Using Displacement on Shaders may significantly decrease Canvas frame rate whilst navigating. This can be offset by disabling displacement on individual Shaders, or by globally disallowing the Tesselation Allowed setting found under Preferences > GPU > Shaders.

• ID 64924 / BZ 34690 - Flattening or caching layers or channels on complex projects may cause Windows to reset the graphics driver due to the long processing time. To work around this issue, you can try to flatten or cache fewer layers at a time, or reduce the value of the Max Render Size For Baking setting. This setting can be found under Preferences > GPU > Baking and Projection.
Reducing this size breaks the flattening or caching operation up into smaller pieces, which individually take less time to calculate, and thereby avoids a Windows graphics driver reset.

• ID 53959 / BZ 26460 - Layers - Painting a mask in a Mask Layer Group sometimes results in unexpected paint results. To prevent this from happening, either:

• Use a white “color” layer at the bottom of your mask stack. Any layer used over this initial “color” layer should then be fine, or

• If you want to create a mask in a Mask Layer Group, simply add another layer on your Mask Layer Group instead, and paint white into it to create a mask.

Mari Tools

• ID 10046 / BZ 13640 - The Blur tool can be slow to use on the initial stroke. Wait for Mari to process the blur before applying a second stroke.

• ID 9567 / BZ 13394 - Using the Select Items tool with the Facing set to Front to select and hide a portion of faces causes some of the faces within the selection to remain visible when zoomed in. To catch all selected faces, either:

• select Facing > Through instead of Front, or

• zoom in closer to the object.

Node Graph

• ID 168753 - AIStandard nodes created in Mari3.0v1 are not compatible with Mari 3.0v2, or later. As a workaround, remove the old AIStandard nodes and recreate them in Mari 3.0v2, or later.

• ID 126902 / BZ 51462 - Creating a shader and attempting to view it in the Node Graph palette gives the impression that the DiffuseColor input edge is missing from the shader node. The input is present, but is incorrectly hidden. This is related to bug 51263 below

• ID 126816 / BZ 51452 - When importing a gizmo, the nodes in the gizmo dTP not retain their organization if they were created using the item name in the menu.

• ID 125961 / BZ 51263 - It is not currently possible to attach the Viewer node to standard Mari shaders, because they are hidden. As a workaround, you can click the View the current channel button above the Node Graph.

• ID 125813 / BZ 51247 - Channel transfer doesn't transfer Graph Layers as expected.

• ID 124611 / BZ 51082 - The Ambient Occlusion node's properties don't include a generate AO option.

• ID 111329 / BZ 48790 - Autoplace does not respect Backdrop nodes.

Nuke<>Mari Bridge

• ID 48970 / BZ 23010 - If Mari crashes when receiving incoming components from Nuke when the Virtual Texture Type is set to Float, lower the Virtual Texture Size to a value below 8192x8192.

• ID 17678 / BZ 19780 - A projector created in Ortho view in Mari does not re-project correctly in Nuke.

Ptex

• ID 13600 / BZ 17626 - It can take a long time to import very large or very high polygon count ptex models. The work-around is to assign a small uniform face size (1x1 or 2x2) on import, and then upres the relevant bits of the model as necessary after loading.

• ID 13531 / BZ 17618 - Ptex does not bake properly if the resolution of the face is too small. The workaround is to increase the resolution of the selected faces you are having problems with.

Shaders

• ID 64961 / BZ 34729 - Mari displays a rendering error on the canvas when it is unable to create a shader. More information has been included to help you determine the cause of the error. Some solutions might be to hide groups and layers, or to cache parts of your layer stack until a shader can be created

• ID 64911 / BZ 34679 - On extremely large projects, issues can arise with shader limits, and reaching the maximum allowed texture slots available. To avoTP reaching these shader limits on large projects, try the following workarounds:

• hide groups and layers, or

• cache groups and layers.

Miscellaneous

• ID 360737 - Linux only: When using the Select Color dialog, the colors picked with the eye dropper Pick Screen Pixels option may be incorrect due to an OS driven behaviour of darkening the rest of the Mari application.
To stop this behaviour the following preference can be disabled:
CentOS 7: Applications > Utilities > Tweak Tool > Windows > Attached Modal Dialogues
This will also disable other desktop manager specific effects.

• ID 308268 - Windows only: When working on multiple monitors, palettes sometimes cannot be docked.

• ID 200836 - Scrolling in the Brush Editor or Tool Properties palette makes the scratch pad go blank.

• ID 194832 - Bake times were significantly increased when baking into channels containing non-linear data.

• ID 167883 / BZ 51934 - When a project that contains a Tiled procedural is upgraded from 2.6 to 3.0, the frame rate drops drastically. To avoTP this, replace the image in the Tiled procedural once the project has been upgraded.

• ID 129292 / BZ 51771 - Removing, changing, or hiding subdivided objects takes a long time.

• ID 126389 / BZ 51370 - Heavier projects are initially slower to render when colorspace is enabled.

• ID 126164 / BZ 51322 - Modo Render: The preview occasionally fails to update fully.

• ID 125437 / BZ 51199 - The AiStandard, RedshiftArchitectural, and VRayMtl shaders are not connected to the Current Channel automatically.

• ID 125319 / BZ 51185 - PythonAPI: Mari's Paint node does not appear in typeList(). To add a Paint node Pythonically, call:

ng = mari.geo.current().nodeGraph()
ng.createPaintNode(width, height, bitDepth)
			

• ID 124614 / BZ 51084 - Animated objects can take a long time to subdivide.

• ID 124233 / BZ 51049 - Texture transfer does not take object transformation into account

• ID 123532 / BZ 50898 - Existing subdivision calculations are lost when recalculating, even if recalculation fails.

• ID 121276 / BZ 50548 - Modo Render: Only camera moves are respected by live update.

• ID 121139 / BZ 50520 - Although faces with degenerate UVs can be loaded into Mari, they can cause issues in some cases. They do not occupy any space in UV, so it's impossible to properly paint on such faces. There is also the risk that some shaders may show undesirable lighting effects on faces with degenerate UVs.

• ID 100303 / BZ 46600 - Ambient Occlusion must be updated after any OpenSubdiv calculation.

• ID 99115 / BZ 46223 - The Sponge Desaturate mode does not work through the full dynamic range as it uses HSL for desaturation. HSL cannot be used with HDR because HSL works well only in LDR values.

• ID 86007 / BZ 41573 - Windows 8 only: The Windows key (Meta key) does not disengage when used in conjunction with a Wacom pen.

• ID 75576 / BZ 37140 - Mac OS X only: By default, when you first install Mac OS 10.8 or higher, the security preferences are set so that any applications not downloaded from the Apple App Store can’t be installed.
To ensure that Mari installs correctly, navigate to System Preferences > Security & Privacy on your Mac and select Anywhere for the Allow applications download from field.

• ID 62668 / BZ 33293 - Linux: Launching Mari with the language set to one without certain character symbols resulted in Mari failing with an error that the specified transform could not be loaded. To work around this, set the locale (language) to English.

• ID 60643 / BZ 31946 - Sometimes paint is not baked because of memory management issues on the graphics card. This can be due to issues such as a high resolution paint buffer, a high bit-depth paint buffer, large virtual texture size, or even a large scale value on the paint buffer transform. These issues can usually be identified by glError: 0x505 out of memory messages in the log. Try reducing any or all of these values to prevent it happening. Graphics drivers are continually improving, so it’s also worth checking whether upgrading your drivers resolves the problem.

• ID 45590 / BZ 20510 - If you find that the startup time for Mari is longer than usual, please check that the LIC files in your RLM licensing data folder do not refer to obsolete server ports. If they do, place them in another directory and restart Mari.

• ID 37066 / BZ 20021 - Textures in the canvas intermittently switch between lower and higher resolutions. This issue is more likely to occur if your virtual texture resolution is low, and you're working on a complex model with displacement. Possible workarounds include increasing your virtual texture size, reducing the number of channels Mari has to access at once (for example, by reducing the number of channels required for the current shader), to reduce the patch resolution of patches in the channels used in the shader, or to use a smaller canvas window or monitor.

• ID 9758 / BZ 14201 - Linux only: Mari becomes unresponsive after the system is woken from sleep.

• ID 9631 / BZ 13700 - Adjusting the Camera > Perspective settings for a Projector is not reflected on the canvas until the Projector is made Current.

• ID 9363 / BZ 12102 - Current brush settings do not get saved as part of the project. Instead, Mari reverts to the default settings when you close and relaunch it.

• ID 9342 / BZ 11874 - Mari doesn’t recognize 3-digit padded .obj sequences as animation

• ID 8030 / BZ 13571 - Launching a new version of Mari for the first time, when a config file exists from a previous version, sometimes results in an object not appearing in the Ortho view.
To solve this, close Mari, delete the following config file and relaunch Mari:

• Linux: ~/.config/TheFoundry/Mari.conf

• Windows: C:/Users//.mari/TheFoundry/Mari.ini

• ID 7945 / BZ 13294 - Windows: Mari sometimes crashes when trying to load data on large projects due to the program exhausting all window manager objects.
To reconfigure the user object limit:

• Open regedit and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_ MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\NT\CurrentVersion\Windows, and

• Edit USERProcessHandleQuota to a larger number.

If this number gets too large, you may also have to modify GDIProcessHandleQuota.

Developer Notes

These are the changes relevant to developers.

New Features

There are no new features in this release.

Feature Enhancements

• ID 381596 - The PythonAPI ProjectManager.open() function now exposes a new optional Force argument to force opening a project.

Bug Fixes

• ID 393167 - Linux only: libIex.so, libIexMath.so, libIlmImf.so, libIlmThread.so or libImath.so are no longer shipped with Mari.

• ID 350668 - Running the application in terminal mode sent the verbose output to the console.

• ID 387216 - The mari.lights.list() function returned an empty list.

• ID 387789 - Calling the mari.LayerStack.createMaterialLayer() function for a target within a Multi-Channel Group Layer would cause Mari to crash.

• ID 393084 - When registering custom nodes Mari would print lots of debug messages to the log.