Foundry calls the Mari 7.5 Beta the most requested feature in Mari’s history. After years of projecting diffuse, then specular, then bump, artists can now attack them all in one pass. Mari 7.5v1 introduces Multi-Paint, a workflow that allows simultaneous painting or projection into up to eight texture streams. Each stroke or projection can affect colour, specular, bump, roughness and beyond, aligned in a single gesture.

The system builds on Mari’s existing paint buffer. Nothing is committed to a bake until the artist decides. This means familiar tools such as Warp, Clone Stamp or even the slightly esoteric Roller Brush now apply across every chosen channel without breaking alignment. Foundry’s marketing line about “the days of manually aligning your diffuse and specular projections being gone” is, for once, technically accurate.

Multi-Paint is controlled from a dedicated Multi-Channel Painting palette in the Palettes toolbar. At any time, only one stream is designated as the Primary Stream, indicated by a white eye icon. This is the stream that drives the live preview, syncs with colour swatches and keeps toolbar settings consistent. Behind the scenes, however, up to seven other channels are painted at the same time. The new Multi-Channel Paint Node integrates into the Node Graph exactly like a Material or standard Paint node. For those who need consistency across multiple assets, presets can be stored in the Shelf palette and reused without rebuilding channel setups from scratch.

Most of Mari’s core painting tools were reworked for this new context. Select Tool Fill, Paint, Roller Brush, Blur, Paint Buffer Eraser, Paint Through, Clone Stamp, Warp, Pinup, Slerp, Tow Brush, Marquee Select and the various Paint Buffer Transform tools all now respect Multi-Paint. Even projection masks and brush properties carry over.

The workflow is intentionally flexible. You can switch between single-channel painting and Multi-Paint at will, either by toggling the active button in the palette or by debugging between contexts. The node-based architecture remains untouched, meaning that network organisation for lookdev and shading pipelines does not require a rethink.

Image Manager gets a makeover

With Multi-Paint in place, the supporting infrastructure also needed work. The Image Manager is no longer organised in tabs but in Groups. Groups allow images to be collected, given a shader model and assigned directly to streams. Instead of dragging single textures around, artists can now drop an entire group into the Multi-Paint palette. Mari attempts to auto-assign based on naming conventions, and when that fails, streams can be set manually.

Shader model awareness is baked in. For example, albedo can be mapped directly to Base Color in the Principled BRDF model. Each group has its own properties, searchable streams and support for vendor-specific presets. Foundry claims that this saves setup time when working with asset packs from major scan vendors.

Dragging and dropping images now works both from within Mari and from the operating system’s file browser. Inside groups, images can be rearranged or expanded with a double click. All of this is designed to reduce the clicks needed to get Multi-Paint running.

The Bakery learns new tricks

Mari’s texture baking engine, introduced as “The Bakery” in version 7.0, evolves in 7.5 with a new Texture Transfer system. Textures and even complete node graphs can now be moved between objects with different UV layouts.

In practice, an artist can select nodes in the Node Graph, right click and choose Selection > Transfer. The Texture Transfer dialogue then offers several options:

• Source and Destination: defines which object’s textures will be moved and where they will go.
• Transfer Method: either UV Remap from Bakery, which generates UV coordinate mappings automatically, or UV Remap from File, which relies on pre-generated UV maps.
• Size: controls resolution of UDIMs, either matching the source or specifying new fixed sizes.
• Bleed Edges and Fill Colour: optional quality-of-life controls for edge generation and initial fills.

Foundry’s own test case claims that moving three 28-UDIM, 4k 16-bit Paint nodes into a single 4k UDIM took only ten seconds, a drastic improvement over earlier versions. Speed aside, the ability to repurpose textures between models with non-matching UVs should help both asset reuse and last-minute production changes.

Backups stop dragging their feet

Mari’s automatic backup and recovery system has been reorganised. Projects with missing files can now be recovered from autosaves or backups. A new Tag Version option allows manual tagging, while the Restore menu has been restructured into sub-menus by tag and by date range. “Today”, “Yesterday”, “This Week”, “Last Week”, “This Month” and “Last Month” are new categories, and older backups remain available for those who need them.

Backups can be tagged manually, and automatic backups receive system tags that no longer clutter the menu. The Python API exposes control over which tags appear in the user interface. A “Latest” option was added for quickly tagging the most recent backup.

Performance has also been addressed. Loading projects from backups is faster because Mari now copies data on demand rather than blocking until the full project is ready. The backup process itself now supports multi-threading. Developers can set thread counts via the Python API, command line or environment variables, with the default being two threads. A safeguard prevents accidental project deletion while backups are in progress.

Under the hood

Mari 7.5v1 conforms to the VFX Reference Platform CY2023. That keeps it two years behind the current CY2025 standard, but ensures pipeline stability for studios that already aligned to CY2023 with Mari 7.1. Foundry lists updated libraries: FBX has been bumped from 2020.3.4 to 2020.3.7, libxml2 from 2.12.5 to 2.13.8, OpenSSL from 3.0.13 to 3.0.16, zlib from 1.2.13 to 1.3.1, and OpenEXR from 3.1.4 to 3.1.13.

System requirements appear unchanged from Mari 7.1. Official support remains Windows 10 and later, plus Rocky Linux and RHEL 9. At press time no macOS build is listed.

Licensing and availability

Mari remains rental only. Individual subscriptions are priced at $86 per month or $689 per year. Team licences now cost $1,229 per year, roughly sixty dollars more than the previous version. At the time of writing, Mari 7.5v1 is available as a public beta for Windows and Linux. Foundry has not announced a final release date.

Should you update now?

Multi-Paint fundamentally alters Mari’s painting workflow. If it works as advertised, it eliminates the long-standing need to align multiple projections by hand, a task that has wasted countless hours across the industry. The technical leap is significant, but so are the unknowns.

Multi-Paint’s performance with high-resolution multi-UDIM assets remains to be seen, particularly when eight channels are active. Auto-assignment of image groups will succeed in cleanly named asset libraries, but may stumble in less organised environments. Texture Transfer promises near-instant conversions, but large-scale production data is always more complex than test cases.

As with any beta release, studios should evaluate Mari 7.5 in controlled tests before relying on it in production. Pipeline stability, node compatibility and asset consistency should be checked against studio standards. Whether the performance holds up under full production load will determine if this becomes Mari’s most celebrated release or another case of “great on paper, rough in practice”. As always, the only safe advice is to test thoroughly before committing to production.

Foundry Mari 7.5v1 Beta 1 Release Notes

The post Eight Hands, One Brush: Mari 7.5 Beta Paints on All Fronts first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.