Mari Node graph procedural texturing

Peter Aversten

Lead Texture Artists

Editor in Chief
Meshmen Studios

Procedural Texturing in Mari

The node graph is the future, but as all node based tools there is always a trade of when it makes sense to use it. If all you do is to paint a mask or two them the node graph is probably overkill and not for you.

However if you plan to make an easy to update asset that use masks to dictate materials and regions and updating them all in one go then the Node Graph is a crucial part of the texturing toolbox

“Once you enabled the nodegraph there is no going back!”

Peter Aversten

The bake point node is my favoutite new node.

lets dive into the nodegraph!


I have completely ditched the  layer workflow for anything than simple touch ups and masks.

No denying there is a lot of room for improvements in the node graph when it comes to sharing cloning and navigation but the flexibility outweighs the lack of some features.

Procedural Texturing and Bake point

To be able to do heavy procedural texturing a cache system is needed as if you are used to the Mari layer system all of us have hit the wall for what is possible and you have to resort to cache your layers but doing this in the layer stack makes the workflow hard to manage. By using the bake point node in the Mari node graph you are more free where and when you cache portions of you graph and you also get notified if you upstream of the bake point make changes as its turns red saying the node is out of sync and you can choose to rebake the result.

This opens possibilities for a true non destructive Procedural workflow. In the Video tutorial I go through this and other Node graph related work-flows

Happy Painting

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Peter Aversten