I did this the day it came out on July 16th and immediately ran into a glitch with their online shop, which their support with some help from me was able to resolve and I finally got my 15 day license.
Well at least now I know what the Mari logo stands for:
This is my computer being crushed by the resource demands of Mari
It seems, my graphic card is just too old/limited to handle the workload Mari is giving to it. It runs, but quite slowly. I have a Geforce 8500GT based card with 512MB.
I meet all the Mari system recommendations expect with the graphics card, where they recommend at least 1GB of RAM and Quadro FX cards.
Well, at least I could try out a lot of aspects of Mari and see how immensely useful this tool could be. With some considerations on workflow it is quite usable in a pipeline with blender.
The price tag of 846 EUR (including tax in the EU) , although low in comparison to Photoshop, is still too high for me, especially considering the accompanying mandatory update of my graphics hardware.
After all it was (and for 6 days still is) a great experience and leaves me with one important insight:
I will have to invest in a graphics card update.
Until now I considered my 8500GT adequate to run my applications and (old) games. With the advent of all the GPU accelerated software I think this evaluation is no longer valid.
Here is a small testshot of the entry scene highlighting the areas of work I did during the last weeks, mainly cloth simulation, hair and environment texturing.
The lighting used here is a bit more than basic and gives a better idea of the mood for this scene. But its only simple lighting, no render layers and no compositing or color correction.
Cloth simulation looks ok now and will be used for the final. The hair looks ok but still needs some more attention, but I am relieved to have it somewhat working. The environment texturing is close to final for the principal textures, only some more subtle coloring will be added.
Whats still missing is texturing/shading of Ara and her dress.
Right now one frame from this shot has a rendertime of 56 seconds in full resolution (1920×1080) on my amd quadcore system. This makes me optimistic to reach my goal of ~4 min per frame. An Interesting side note here is that the preparation time before the rendering itself is starting is 30 secs, so the actual rendertime is 26 secs. As the preparation time does not take advantage of multiple cpus this is a value which does not scale with more cpus.
Right now my time tracker is at 736 hrs and still counting:
Its good to see all the single parts put together into a small shot. Whats even better, is that it gets exactly the mood and look I had in mind when I started this whole project. This is very satisfying and helps bear the sometimes difficult times during production of this short.
The shot was rendered at 75% of the full resolution, so do yourself a favour and view it fullscreen.
I decided to write a post about the current state of texturing the rocks and cliffs for scene 1.
Although far from finished it is a first approximation of what I am aiming for.
After the various expeditions into cloth and hair land I thought that texturing was a voyage into known territory. As like so many preconceptions during the development of this project, this turned out to be some wishful thinking again.
While trying to get everything in place for the entry scene I also allocated time for some serious cloth simulation.
Some may remember that I had several attempts to setup a workflow which would allow me to do fast animation prototyping and yet have all the links to the cloth simulation ready.
Well, that was my impression some days ago too. And then I started to actually apply the cloth simulation to one of the entry scenes. It failed miserably.
I worked a bit more on the eyes and started to put some facial features on Ara’s face. I used the current SOC sculpt branch from graphicall for the sculpting and I am quite pleased with the tools which get developed there – very great improvement going on here.
After all the sculpting and modeling for the first set I thought is was time to enhance Ara as well and work on some remaining tasks such as the eyes.
Until now the eyes were pretty much a placeholder for the real ones. The outer geometry was there to aid in the rigging and shape key definition, but no further modeling/texturing was done.
As the eyes are said to be a mirror of the soul I wanted Ara to have eyes that could accomplish this. That meant no pixar style eyes and after browsing through a lot of eye tutorials I finally settled on the workflow of an eye tutorial from the gnomon workshop. Its for maya, but he principles are easily transferred to blender.
Well, the modeling part was quite fast, but the texturing part was a little bit more time consuming. And its also a bit too early to start the texturing, but in this case you have to texture it, other wise you cannot see the iris and thus the most important part of the eye.
During my render tests for the image you see at the beginning of this post, I soon realized that the lighting task will be very important to bring the eyes to life. I also ran into a problem with the render engine. I wanted to have raytraced refraction activated on the cornea of the eye, but if I do this, the bumps on the iris are not rendered. Right now I use simple ztransparency to get the bumps, but the eyes do not look good from the side. I also tried the standard render engine from 2.5 but got the same result. Looks like I have to find a compromise somehow
Another point I notice now that the eyes are more defined, is that I have to work on the alignment of the two eyes. Right now they seem a little off.
And for those who are wondering, yes, Ara will have red hair and green eyes
