Mari VS Substance Painter - What's the Best Texturing Tool?

hey guys have you Morton front flip normals here in this video we are going to be talking about Mari versus painter this is a pretty interesting topic a bunch of people have asked us about this in the comments and in general about I'm interested in texturing should I use painter from algorithmic or should I use Mari from the foundry and they're both great yeah I mean get ready for the fanboys war in the in the comments are sure but we're gonna be we're gonna try and stay as unbiased as possible yeah just because we want to look at the strengths and weaknesses of both of these software and yeah so we're gonna try and take a more sort of like less dividing approach and see what is actually the good and the bad of both of them it's up to you guys to you know start the war in the comments yeah we definitely want to flame were comments we are not gonna crown a winner here we're gonna just go over some of the differences yeah I've used Mari for many years in production as a texture artist that was that was my job basically in the effects I was doing sculpting and texturing so I have a lot of experience with Mari it's in production from painter that that's something which is is a more recent software hmm but it's something that I've really been getting into recently as well so with that said let's just get more into it we this is what mari looks like mari has a bunch of buttons and it has a bunch of icons and it's really a very elaborate software if we switch to painter we can see that it's a lot easier yeah it's a lot calmer on the ice yeah this is one of the main differences people have when it comes to this from the user point of youth between Mari versus pain is that Mari is very easy to get into yeah well sort of painter painter is very easy to get into Mari is not very easy to get into so this is something I've experienced firsthand because I am NOT a texture artist and I used Mari when I've needed to like mostly it's been for some displacement stuff that I just need to make some quick Thai labels and then I get messages being a headache how do I do that expected and I like from my point of view I think Mari is a extremely cluttered and messy software the UI is I feel like it's hard to navigate but there's just so much functionality in there so once you start you know get familiar with it it's less of an issue because you have so much more there's so much more control that just opens up to you whereas when I started getting into painter it was just you know go through a quick few quick tutorials and you have most of what you need like on board pretty quickly yeah it's one of the issues in Mari is well is it's not our issue per se it's just that they have so many features developed yeah and they need to have them somewhere rolling while painter is a lot less mature software in the way that just it doesn't have that many features yet yeah which they might run into the issue of complexity in the future one of the main things between the two software apart from just the visual interface when we use a point of view is that they were trying to solve very different issues Mari was build basically in the fires of Wetty trying to fires of Mordor fires in water and it's all very a very specific technical issue which was in the effects you have to get so much data through the production it's not so much about can you do this can you paint the maps in a quick manner it's more we just need a lot of resolution on this monkey yeah we need to get as close as possible to have the universe in his eye can you do it and in mark yes yes you can so that was the very specific issue they were trying to solve well painter is trying to solve a different issue which is making texture painting easy and accessible yeah which means they are focusing on different pockets at least different they're approaching in a different way and I think that's also like the way I see is that for Mari it's it's very much tailored towards the effects there and you know maybe some high-end stuff for game cinematics as well so that's I would say that's a tinier market just in terms of like how many people then you've got all the hobbyists and all the people that want to get into games the people working in games they're using painter and it because well I guess what we've talked about is just what do you need like from your tool you don't need a hundred you teams in a game because it doesn't support it no you need that from the effects so they just solve very different issues so it's a specific issue here we could look at it in a uddham in the UV you here we can see we have each one of these it's one extra map this is one unit we have separate videos on this on talking about YouTube's and UVC if you wanna check that out but each one of these is now 4k which is a lot or a solution yeah which means that for this character here you can for most commercials this will probably be perfectly fine for film you will probably need like four times the resolution with this but it means you on a character like this you can probably go this close up to and it would still mostly hold up in a frame if you go to painter this is what we have to work with we have one map which currently is just set to 1k yeah which I mean that's 1 million pixels in each one of these YouTube's here has 16 million pixels so basically we're talking about what we have in painter current is like this little area yeah it's tiny so the resolution you can get into in Mari is like in an absolute way is is is higher like there is just no debate on on that Mari has just a lot better performance or rather it can support it can support a lot more data yeah performance is kind of up to your hardware performance is actually an issue with Mari because you can you can run in painter on a lot of different setups it that's not a huge issue my my my daily work station is actually a laptop and it runs painter perfectly fine well Mari I actually have issues running Mari at least if I don't talk about more than one udimm so performance is a huge deal between them that Mari can handle so much more data if you have a good graphics card yeah and I mean in a VFX production you will I don't know they're like four or five thousand pounds yeah my what Pacific Rim line was five and a half thousand 24 gigs of ram run to graphics card yes so that's that's a whole nother beast yeah and you can see like so this this becomes an issue when we're talking about characters like there's this one coherent mesh there's no breakups in between so there's no way to really hide your seams so there are ways to you know hack around the lack of um support in in painter but then you do end up with the seams and you have to paint those out between different you times whereas that's not an issue in Mari because you just have full you Tim support so that's you know that's one strength of Mari that painter doesn't have but again the architecture is completely different and you need super powerful hardware to work with that yeah basically what we're talking about here is if you need to paint across this seemed like that would be selected here this is one udimm you can't really do that in painter like this this stroke here you actually couldn't do know which is just between one uddham to another actually what we're seeing here as well this is another another differences between two as well if you when you're painting in Mari you're actually not paint you're gonna mesh right now you're painting on on like a glance paint but it's in it which means you can now take this and you can now start to adjust stroke or the image or whatever this you have which is really handy when you're projecting a lot of issues remember Mari was built for VFX were you mostly use photographic reference yeah you mostly take this and you really project it down hit the B key to bake it while in painter you're actually painting on the mesh you can see here that if you look at the cursor that it actually goes around the surface this has a lot of advantages this means that you can hand paint something in painter a lot more in a lot better way yeah it's it's very hard to hand paint on a mesh when you're not hand painting on the mesh because it doesn't really conform to the surface we end up with areas like this is this kind of stuff and that's just you know it's the same thing in if you were to look at poly painting in ZBrush it also paints directly on the mesh which is why you know that can also be an excellent tool for for hand painting textures I really prefer actually that my favorite tool for hunting textures actually see brush yeah so this is a huge issue in painter there are ways to get a row sorry one is a huge issue in Mari there are ways to get around this in Mari there are edge masking and all that but that's kind of like ended on a very bleeding wound yeah because it really doesn't it really doesn't allow you to just paint creatively an experiment with all these kind of things it's just two very fundamental approaches to painting so yeah exactly so it's it would super nice if we had that feature in painter as well like proper projection workflow like you do have in Mari where you paint on a glass pane but you know let's maybe that's coming maybe maybe that's a nice coming so big big difference hand painting good in painter yeah not good in Mari another thing as well which is one of the big differences is how much control you have over each pixel if you were to paint something here in a lunar new layer and Mari you can let's just do it's also Polly's for the shittiest painting job in the world but also you can already see here NASA in this workstation we have a gtx 980ti so fairly beefy gaming graphics card but it still takes a while because it needs to create a layer for all of your you don't yeah it's it's quite heavy so what you can do here and now we have a layer we're just disc this stuff on and now you can do bunch of stuff just on this layer one of the cool thing is you can add mask stacks to it so a mask pack just means that it's kind of like I'm like a like a layer mask in Photoshop just that you can stack it on top of each other so you have a layer here now you can mask this out and now you can just keep on going for in infinity over this so you can keep adding stuff on top of these kind of things actually let's add it you can add like a mask adjustment stack to these kind of things you can add a gamma node just it once I painted and you can just keep on going forever and ever and ever so it's very granular control yes over like one specific set of pixels in like one channel yeah it's it you have a lot of control you have a lot of control we were talking about before recording video like it's like if you had the same amount of resolution for a solution was an issue could you get to the same level of result in painter and Mark and yes yes you can you can you definitely can get the same result if if you you're painting on a 4k map but one difference is in Mari you can really control each pixel to a whole different level you can create masks which really you can just do so many different things with in painter you definitely have control as well but not as granular control yes what we might not need now what we talked about was like it's it takes a lot longer in Mari to get up to that you know super high res and everything's great in painter it makes it really easy and quick to get up to a certain percentage really fast so you you're at a baseline very very quickly whereas even getting up to the baseline in Mari still takes some time but then getting from you know let's say the 70% to 100% in painter that's when you really have to start to work for it and that's where it sort of like switches roles where Mari starts to get easier and easier yeah and one of these the one of the reasons here as well is also due to resolution because a lot of times it's in painter you you if you are doing character like this you are capped by one tile by one udimm so you just is this a technological issue that you actually can't really get to hundred percent like if you want to get this close to a character yeah in in painter like you you actually can't do it so but you can get very quickly to a result where it works what works here yeah and one of the reasons is because of smart materials this is where you have a bunch of smart materials like you can drag on basic human skin and you know you have something which is which is going to work in an okay matter this is the human skin isn't amazing we have some good ones by 8 X 4 X 4 C by our friends over there which are pretty decent but for most things you would probably be using more like concrete or you know copper or whatever and then you can see right away you get a really good result right away if you set this to try planar we might get oh yeah that was the one below it so you can do bunch of different things here where you can get up to a quick result right away getting this kind of result this quickly in in Mari is actually impossible yeah because you don't have this smart material system and you also don't have like a substance designer in the backend to to support it you can get incredibly cool results right away so this just as a note you know this was something that we put a video out on some months ago when we actually went and talked to the foundry mm-hmm and these we want some of the things that we talked about and and you know they had a preview of what's gonna be installed for the next Marty but or next update or whatever it is but as it stands right now this is definitely one of the major strengths of painter as well just how quick and easy it is to get up you know just throw on a smart material but I would also say that that is it's also one of the downsides of painter because it's it means that I would say that it means that a lot of texture artists in air quotation marks here are getting lazy and especially if they're just starting out then you might have you know get to have the approach that okay just smart materials on and a few masks and I'm done the problem with that is that everyone starts to have the same you know rubber material everyone has the same concrete material and they're you lack a lot of variation because you haven't had to make all the masks yet that's one of the strengths of Mari we will have to make all this yourself yeah exactly what I was actually just talking to somebody at a school now who've been told by touch partisan island who was reviewing their show reels that he could see which smart materials use as a basis like he can a lot of these are very prominent like this one friends like my shear like it's you just have both regardless you have a lot of these which oh that's because I haven't baked any masks for this alright which is you should definitely do but a lot of these they just look they just look like the smart material yeah because it's so easy to get a cool result from it actually what what you saw here where the material didn't work it's supposed to look something like this what I have tons of splotches that's because we haven't baked any masks you have to bake masks in in painter for it to really work we're gonna cover that in future videos there's also a big difference between Mauryan and painter yeah yeah that's one or one or ways that painter gets the results so quickly that before you start to project you you bake masks like a inclusion ID curvature thickness and all these kind of things and the smart materials they rely on these materials or these masks these bake masks and maps too that's why they're smart so like if you have a curvature mask and or curvature map that you've baked you know if you apply a flaked paint material here you know on his his ears and stuff like tiny surfaces where you have directional changes you would start to see the paint flake off yeah and that's that's something that you don't even have to work for and you're already at like a really high level then what you could do afterwards is you can go in and manually just paint some more masks to really tweak it definitely recommend doing that we are currently working really hard on a prima turtle where we're gonna be talking about this in more in depth where you know you should we start off with some with some basic materials yeah smart materials or doesn't just general materials and then you you paint on top of them to make them look good another big thing is that in painter you can paint across multiple channels which is really cool all this nasty stuff if you make just a new layer we can now you can go down here and you can see that you're not painting on a bunch of different materials at once so you can paint like a height map you can paint we can paint a color map and a spectrum all the same time so you can see that now we're painting we can add an italic it was a nice metallic feel to it that's a different specular value or roughness value yeah this is where one of these words the Mari Gus would be like yeah you can do this Mario's well yes you can what are linking and sort of linking no you got it you guys set a layer to be to be shareable and you've got a share share channels across and it's just not very intuitive and when you when you get to that level in Mari where you know you have a super high-resolution character painting across multiple channels in multiple layers it just takes a long time to bake as well and it gets quite confusing yeah but that's also actually what you just mentioned there baking and in production this is one one thing you were going to do often in production is you UVs are changing yeah now you can update your heavies here as well it's fairly easy you can just go and just import a new model and it will reproject the new things but there aren't any settings for this yeah you aren't actually baking the maps because everything here is it's live each stroke you do is live which means that if kernel painting on 1k we can easily press this to 4k no problem at all but a lot of times you just have to bake down your textures and transfer them to a whole new use that may be the model looks different but a lot of these districts you just really rely on yeah so if I were it was in the production I couldn't use painter olicity effects i couldnt use painter by itself I would probably have to go into Mari yeah a few times but you could use painter for is make some super cool Thai levels yes for example and then you know throw them in tomorrow and then you vary everything with your masks in Mari there's a lot of people are doing actually they're making their base materials in designer they're putting them into painter and then just to see how they look and then they they paint mosques in Mari and they only use Mario for masks now yeah there's actually a fairly popular way of doing it and for characters I would still do a full character for film at least I would still do the full character in Mari because you're gonna finalize it there anyway and you just needed a resolution yeah for film you're never talking about one udimm that would be like the most background of background characters it's like a rock in the corners yeah exactly like borign for the films we worked on we might we might be talking between sixty and a hundred udimm space in there a solution or you're talking about so there was just there was just no way you can use painter for characters for films today for games you could yeah or if you you have a character we just noticed a naked boy like this but it's putting ass clothing on yeah you know like yeah it is yeah it's like an armor set here and he has like a bit of armor set here then you could easily split those into separate separate maps or separate texture sets and then you're fine and like most most characters and games wear clothes anyway so you could have something higher resolution and painter for the face for the arms for the clothing and stuff so you know normal characters that aren't completely naked and one coherent mesh you could definitely get up to a to a higher level there a painter yeah and also in games you you really just you don't don't want that resolution you couldn't have sixty items like you you couldn't run in any game whatsoever so you the visual quality there is just it's just lower yeah just in because you just aren't getting as close or if you are getting close you just accept that it's not gonna look completed for real yeah well the requirement of film is it needs to fool the eye it needs to look real little game you know a game looks like a game because it's a game yeah I mean there are they do look impressive very much like uncharted and stuff like that very very good stuff that's super hard stuff exactly another difference between the two is that in pain tree you have IRA for rendering IRA is amazing while in Mari you have the motor render engine well but that's really just not as well implemented in painter I raised really well implemented if you tena felt like the motor render was put in and then forgotten yeah I think I tried to use it a few times the motor render and I have never really got my head around it in painter I just press I don't know if 11 or so it's it's again I think that just shows the different kinds of implementations where oftentimes in painter is just an easy one button click solution of an implementation whereas in Mari you there's a lot of steps to get up to some level but then again you can get up to a higher level except for when it comes to rendering yeah but else I also wouldn't care about that math to to use of as a what software it's not a selling point for you to decide exactly because right now it's it's a texturing software it's not like Maya or blender or whatever which is like a you can start and end your thing there no this is it's an intermediary software first you need assets built and also in a regular 3d 3d software and then you were most likely going to export your maps out very very rarely what you actually use painter as the final thing unless maybe for a portfolio piece or something so what we have done is we've actually used pain to render final product shots for food normals really cool like we made so we have the flip normals lighting scene and from that we made the flip normals HDR eyes which is just like a you know it's like a bass line of the lighting scenes where you don't have as much control but just throw them on there so we just have some textured assets in painter and we wanted to see what it would look like if we just used IRA and HT our eyes and it actually ended up being so quick and easy that we just ended up rendering a substance that's that's kind of a secondary yeah yeah it's totally saying there's like I didn't we didn't even paint in their textures on there yeah we use interests a rendering yeah point is just I wouldn't know I wouldn't use a dad as a determining factor it would be more where can you get the quickest maps out of it yeah yeah you know what it's designed for yeah exactly for anything if there's anything else we should talk about um oh yes I we have to say which one is the best before we do that one cool thing is if you want quick maps like let's just leave these kind of things if you want like a quick run app grunge might be something you do all the time for every single character or every single asset you do you need crunch maps whatever maps you do you can very easily get this in painter there was just so many which ships with them which is just their old is made in designer as far as I know so it's not just grunge but it's like it's like anything you can very quickly just change the result of it you can duplicate it you can add something new this is it sounds like a small thing but one of the when one of your texturing you end up using a two or three grunge maps for the entire project the fact that you can just pick and choose all super funky you can just choose all these is honestly for me one of the things which speeds up my texturing so much just because if what you do is spend all the time on crunch maps and you have unlimited grunge maps as its gonna speed up your texturing well if you go into Mari you would have a bunch of procedurals you're talking about a color or like clouds you have a lot of cool ones here and if you have in the extension pack which you definitely need to have MRE then you have a bunch more but it's it's still like basic turbulence it's still very basic things the generators and stuff that they haven't substance are very powerful is the ones from designer they're so cool yeah and you can use in to mask stuff out as well like if you want to mask its out you can easily do that and have a generator here and and mask is out with with these kind of things as well I know this is gone for good workers don't know cavity mask but uh super cool stuff so yeah we can we can talk more in depth if there is anything you guys request but realist around it off is they solve different issues yeah mari is the tool you need if you need really insane textures or anything more than a single uddham yeah four characters painter is tool you want to use if if you want to get up to a certain to like a decent result really really quickly where you know you can take it further so for me it's not so much which tool is the best it's more what's the best for the job yeah and for characters you know for especially for me Effects and cinema and stuff like that mari is hands-down the best tool yeah it's just it's just way more powerful if you're doing hard surface assets then painter is definitely going to be your go-to just because of all the smart materials the ease of use you know the way you bake all your your cavity maps curvature maps and stuff you can get a really really high quality result in painter there which is gonna be a lot harder at Mars so it really depends on the job you're you're doing so if you're a student now and watching this and you're like so so mister hanging Morton what what software should learn you should learn both yeah you really you you really should because it's like what's better a hammer or screwdriver well I mean learn both and then also if you if you're a bit more hardcore I learn designer as well designer is is amazing there's a whole different story yeah that's just basically how do you if painter is how do you paint this kind of stuff designer is how do you make these materials one of the most powerful software out there out there today in terms of texturing yeah I guess as I finally just thought of it's also price oh yeah painter I think it's like a hundred two hundred dollars or something we don't know so I think I think it's not like anyway it's way cheaper than than Maury so that's also one thing you have to consider is the cost of those things oh and also another thing in regards to that and painter is being actively updated now Mari is also being actively updated and I'm sure we have some our developers listening on this as well but not to the same extent I use the same version of of Mari for my entire career in 2.6 yeah a starter in 2.5 and I ended in 2.6 V 64 or something like that yeah like that was we quit for was out yeah exactly but no one used for exactly and we using version 4 here but the differences really aren't that big they have like Oh check it out it's it's floating yeah cool and now it disappears again that's cool and there are some differences or some small differences there's no de Graaff pretty big thing but I dated a I literally don't notice a difference but in this version and what I use four years ago five years ago in painter I is a difference from each quarterly version if you used a spring edition versus a summer edition like huge differences but that could also be down to just the sheer amount of features that already exist in Mari could and you know just that being maybe more of a mature texturing software yeah so it's like yeah there are there are a lot of differences and they both have their strengths and weaknesses there there is no final winner you know in this battle it seems like Mari is taking inspiration from painter to become more like painter and painter is taking inspiration of Mario more like like Mari so now the question is which one can become the other of the font is gonna get there first it's gonna be interesting to follow yeah this the game here changes if Mari if painter gets proper udimm support yeah then the balance here changes dramatically islands of the force balancing work so if you guys are listening from a foundry you know oso4 live from foundry from algorithmic then you you know you wanna really get that up but yeah I think I think that just about covers most of the things sort of we wanted to highlight here I'm sure we've missed a bunch of different things yes very and I'm gonna predict there's gonna be a bunch of comments with very specific features but this makes this software the best because you can rotate this light in this way or something and make sure to leave those we'd be interested in reading it just like because we're definitely missed a lot of stuff but yeah I think this is gonna be our final verdict on this at least for now we might return to this once both of these get more updates but yeah if you want to see more content like this in the future make sure to LIKE comment and subscribe and make sure to turn on notifications because YouTube is it's not doing that for you being a little sneaky yeah thanks guys you

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 68,420

Rating: 4.8283262 out of 5

Keywords: 3d, sculpting, zbrush, concept, maya, tutorial, autodesk, film, vfx, animation, flippednormals, henning sanden, morten jaeger, creature, character, texturing, substance painter, substance designer, education, foundry, pixologic, nuke, art, fundamentals, art fundamentals, art school, art tutorials, blender, flipped normals, 3d tutorial, learning 3d, learning ZBrush, 3ds max, cubebrush, cube brush, gumroad, marvelous designer, photoshop, mari, blender guru

Id: gF3MifkvESc

Length: 29min 50sec (1790 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 14 2019