There’s a new tool on the market that is taking the industry by storm. MARI is the magnificently user friendly 3D paint package that lets an artist spend more time painting and less time battling tech issues. It offers a great many solutions that until now have been missing from comparable applications. Photoshop continues to be an invaluable tool to compositors and motion graphic artists, but MARI has the time saving functionality currently missing.

Tim Flett, Escape Studios Business Development manager, was at the IBC Show last week, where he received a commendation award from The Foundry. He was delighted to collect the award in Amsterdam and said:

The UK attracts worldwide attention for the high standard of post-production being undertaken by facilities around the country. London houses a number of such companies, but this talent stretches up and down the country. Mere Mortals Moving Image, based in Newcastle, is a company growing from strength to strength, while adopting new technologies like Nuke X and Pro Tools HD.

In a fast paced industry, where new technologies are being introduced more frequently, it can be difficult to stay on top of which products successfully aid efficiency and quality in our work. It’s great to know that some companies take an opportunity to show off their products and how they are being utilised in the industry. Last Thursday I made a special effort to attend an event for NUKE and MARI software. The torrential down pour that evening made venturing out difficult, so I was glad to see so many people were able to attend. Armed with umbrellas and rain coats well over one hundred of us braved the weather to enjoy an evening with NUKE and MARI, an event hosted by Escape Studios in collaboration with The Foundry and HP.

I met up with Jon Wadelton at The Foundry a few days ago and we had a chat about what's new in NUKE 6.3.  Here's what he had to say.

The Foundry just released NUKE 6.3 and there’s a lot of new stuff in the product. They’ve taken product development in a direction that allows users in all VFX industries to partake in the benefits of the product. NUKE is no longer just built for artists in the film industry, it is built to create highly visual commercials with the functionality that it now has.

I’ve just finished speaking with Jack Greasley at The Foundry. He shared some interesting information about the latest version of MARI and the bridge between NUKE and MARI. See what he had to say…

Just by being on Linux, MARI has rocked the post industry. All those guys tired of dual-booting, of trying to get Photoshop to work in Wine or some other “in-elegant Linux solution”. Or for those trying to use a laptop hooked up to the network or two machines with a KVM switcher (you know who you are) MARI is like a breath of fresh air! No nasty print type things getting in the way of painting at high bit depths and HDR floating points. Everything works. No nasty greying out of pull downs as it only works in 8 bit situations; geometry size is not an issue either, texture size is 32k square. It’s eats massive data sets elegantly. It’s a Godsend.

I'm really pleased to bring you some news of an update to our current Compositing classroom courses. As most of you will know, what sets us apart from other training institutions is the fact that our courses are entirely industry focused. To ensure we continue to deliver on our promise, our development team regularly meet with industry professionals to refine our courses and align them with the very latest industry requirements. The changes we are making to our Compositing curriculum today will be applied to our 12-week Compositing for Production course as well as our 18-week Compositing Professional course.

I noticed this over at JupiterJazz: AtomKraft Beta2. It's a massive plugin to Nuke enabling a whole host of 3D rendering type workflows. Believe it or not, it puts control of final renders and outputs in the hands of the compers!