Mari vs. Mudbox?

[YoyoBoy]

I assume that Mari is a better 3D painter than Mudbox is, but is it really worth the extra cost? In what areas does it shine?

Thanks.

[Morbid Angel]

We have come to a few conclusions here. While mari is considered to be industry standard for texturing, and it is great at handling very large amounts of tiles and layers with masks, it is unstable and prone to crashing (again in our experience). It needs powerful video cards, but even with that its not very stable. We run quadro 4000, but that was not enough for mari and what we were doing which wasn't anything crazy And you do have limitations like, mari is not a sculpting program so it can't handle a lot of geo in the view port, meshes have to be decimated (reduced) in order for you to paint on them. It does not paint in actual 3d, rather paints on an invisible 2d plane, then projects those pixels once done. But you can have dozens of layers, shaders, masks with it quite easily and its fast with it.

On the other hand, mudbox I feel is kind of reversed. It can handle large amount of geo (sculpted) quite well and painting ops are ok too. They aren't mari, but for me surely get the job done, and I can texture along side mari artists just as fast (if not faster due to mari's instability). Mudbox for me has been rock solid, perhaps I experienced one crash in 2 month, while mari is regular several crashes per day. I have been painting this creature which is 20 tiles in 4k, mudbox could handle 8 layers of various maps just fine, not as spiffy (not as fast) as mari but acceptable. The only big draw back was I had to get lots of ram. While mari caches everything to disk (I think newest mudbox also does) I had to get 80 GB of ram, as in some extreme cases mudbox would go up to 45 GB. With that said though, its a special case kind of scene and I'm not surprised it did use that much ram, but during the process it did not crash once!

Lastly, I had to use ptex vectors for displacement, and here is a fundamental flaw that I encountered, because ptex is vert dependant, you cannot decimate the mesh and send it to mari to output ptex back, and you cannot paint on a 30 million mesh. But mudbox could handle that no problem (again with lots of ram).

Just my 2 c.

[YoyoBoy]

Wow, thanks so much for the fantastic reply, Dmitri! That was really helpful!

[jasonhuang1115]

Dmitry, have you tried texturing hard surface characters consisting hundreds of objects in Mudbox recently? Last time I tried doing that in Mudbox 2011 with 12 GB of RAM on my PC, it couldn't handle the scene where I tried to paint on subdivided geometries (level 6-ish) with bump and displacement sculpted. IIRC, it was not really a RAM issue at that time but the viewport had issue of managing hundreds of objects (hide/unhide, flat to UV painting, etc.). As soon as I ported the scene to Mari, it was a breeze to start painting high-rez textures on multiple tiles. Took me a while to get used to the shader and layering system, but quite surprisingly intuitive when it came to build layered shader in VRay with textures and masks painted in Mari.

Maybe things have changed a lot with Mudbox's giga texture engine and more RAM added.

[Morbid Angel]

Yeah mudbox 2014 and 2011 are worlds apart. But mari was always good at handling exactly the situation you describe.