MARI / MODO / HDR Light Studio - Sneak Peek

We couldn’t wait to give you a sneak peek of some cool stuff we have been assisting develop.

Jacobo Barreiro has been working on a project called MOMA (Jacobo is both an amazing 3D artist and is highly technical too, he is too talented/clever and it’s just not fair!). The MOMA code creates a connection to the MODO renderer for either MARI or MAYA. For this article we are concentrating on the MARI connection and some HDR Light Studio goodness that’s been added in there too.

Below is a video of MOMA in action. Artists texture their models in MARI with a fully rendered MODO preview render available at the touch of a button, utilizing the texture maps that have been created in MARI to drive the various material properties in the MODO shader. This means the artist gets high quality fully rendered visual feedback seeing textures doing their job in-context. Better still you can also launch HDR Light Studio from within MARI and create and explore different lighting conditions around your 3D model in real-time, so you can quickly and easily see how those texture maps are reacting to the different lighting conditions. By adding this functionality to MARI, the MOMA plug-in has provided more meaningful visual feedback for the texture artist – allowing them to make better informed decisions about the maps they are developing. You can really craft the look to a new level with this feedback inside the MARI workflow.

MOMA is currently released under GPL, and it’s free for commercial and personal use. It’s currently for Windows, but Linux/OS X versions are coming soon.