3D art tool Mari powers Star Wars 1313 visuals

The latest version of 3D digital paint tool Mari is being harnessed by LucasArts to help power the impressive visuals seen in its hotly anticipated title Star Wars 1313.

The new update, Mari 1.5, has a array of new features including improved overlapping UV support, games shaders, a Maya texture export feature, shadow support and DDS Cubemap support.

DDS Cubemap support has been designed to allow artists to match the final look of real time assets, whilst mirroring support in Mari’s paint buffer has been integrated so users can take control of symmetrical objects at any stage of development.

LucasArts has adopted Mari 1.5 in production as one of its texturing tools to deal with the vast number of textures within the game environment.

“Integrating Mari at LucasArts for Star Wars 1313 helped us work a lot more efficiently and contributed to making the game visually stunning,” said LucasArts visual effects supervisor Kim Libreri.

“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.”

Mari product manager Jack Greasley added: “Mari 1.5 is the result of close collaboration between The Foundry and our customers.

"We believe that Mari 1.5 is the most exciting texture painting and 3D digital paint tool available and that it addresses the needs of not just VFX and CG but anyone who needs to put pixels onto polygons.”