How Foundry’s new Bakery in Mari 7.0 came to be (and you won’t believe how its name and icon were born, too).
With Mari 7.0, Foundry has introduced The Bakery into its 3D texture painting tool. So, what is The Bakery? Well, it’s Mari’s map baking engine that allows users to create geometry maps–including curvatures and occlusions–without requiring a separate app or plugin to be launched.
befores & afters was looking to go deeper on the new engine in terms of how it came to be and how it works, plus how The Bakery got its name and iconic icon (the pizza oven). So, we asked Charli Holt, Mari product manager, those exact questions.
b&a: OK, so where’d the name ‘The Bakery’ come from?
Charli Holt: That name actually came from the Mari team and the Mari development team. It came up as a joke. Are you familiar with the Cattery on the Nuke side?
b&a: Yes.
Charli Holt: We were thinking we needed somewhere where we could host different recipes where people can say, ‘This is my custom AO. This is my custom curvature,’ and we said, ‘We could have a little website called The Bakery.’ And we were like, ‘That’s funny.’ Honestly, from there, we just thought, ‘Well actually, why don’t we just call it that. It shouldn’t have to be called Vulkan mesh map baker.’
Historically in Mari, we have always stuck to the technical terms for everything. And honestly it gets confusing the amount of things in Mari that use the word channel in them. We wanted to avoid having that happen again. So we thought, ‘Oh, The Bakery, that could be fun.’ And then from there we started thinking about the baked items, i.e. what do you actually want to bake? And we were like, ‘Okay, maybe they’re recipes.’ And it kind of spiraled out from there.
Basically, the Mari team, for years, have been asking for more fun little things in Mari and that was just a nice little way to do that. It made the team happy.
b&a: And it seems obvious and a nice fit as well. That’s the great thing about it, right?
Charli Holt: Yeah, exactly. It led to a lot of different marketing opportunities, a lot of different ways we could word it in posts and honestly it’s just more memorable than Vulkan mesh map baker.
b&a: If someone was coming along, say, a new user of Mari, what’s the best way of describing what you can do with The Bakery?
Charli Holt: The Bakery is a mesh map baker, which means that it takes geometry-based information from one mesh and then it bakes it down into a texture that you can apply to either the same mesh or a different mesh. So you can get high resolution details coming from AOs, curvatures, displacement–from a mesh that has lots of detail–and then use those to drive textures and materials on a lower res model.
Mari has had ways of getting those AOs and curvatures by approximations, but it’s never had its own great way of doing it.
What we’ve found is that a lot of people in the smaller studios, and even a lot of people in the larger studios, have to make the decision to say, ‘Do we have Mari or do we have another application that can do this? Do we have both of them?’ And, you shouldn’t have to make the decision to say, ‘Okay, I’m going to have to pay for two tools to do the work I want to do.’ So, that was the inspiration behind that.
b&a: Right, yes, because, I was going to ask you what artists did do before they could use The Bakery and I guess you’re saying it was a lot more manual process or about using other tools?
Charli Holt: Yes, it was either you spin something up in the MODO bake palette, or you had to bake them out of a third party application and bring those into Mari.
b&a: And so the reason for The Bakery clearly came out of customer feedback, I suppose, but also a desire from Foundry to own that process a bit more. Is that right?
Charli Holt: So, way back in 2022, we did a survey with studios using Mari, and we put together a list of every single feature that we could think of. Out of something like 70 different features listed we said, ‘If you could pick four of these, what would you pick?’ The mesh map baker / Bakery was something that came up very, very high. I think it was the second or third most wanted feature. The roller brush was number one, which is why that was in our 6.0 release. We’re still going through that information and using that to plan for what users might want.
When we were going through all of that information, we categorized it into four sections that we called, internally, the four Ps: painting, proceduralism, pipeline and performance. We used those to target different areas. There was a lot of feedback in painting. That means we needed to put some more effort into our artist tools. All of the feedback that came through that survey was asking for more painting, more proceduralism, whereas historically Mari’s put a lot of time into pipeline and performance because obviously that’s important for the studios.
So I think what’s come out of this, and what’s been clear from the feedback we’ve been getting from Mari 6.0 and also the feedback that we’ve got through the Mari 7.0 alpha/beta cycle, has been that everybody is really eager for us to keep going in the direction of ‘focus on the artist’ and bringing workflows back to Mari. You shouldn’t need to go and use a different application.
For some people, that’s not a simple process. It’s not just, ‘Oh, you spin up a third party application to do this.’ They might be working on Linux, and you need to save your project, close Mari, close the machine, reboot it into Windows, spin that up, get the application, then go back, which is a lot of time that’s taken out of your day.
b&a: For anyone reading this who might be new to 3D texturing, I wonder if they might be thinking, ‘Oh, do I now have to learn a whole new thing? How easy is it to get up to speed with what The Bakery can do?’ You’re obviously going to say it’s easy, but I just mean, how would someone get up to speed on it?
Charli Holt: Honestly, the best way to get up to speed with it is probably just to try it out and spend some time, not necessarily baking, but turning on the preview mode, set that high and just have a play with the recipes that we have there and start tweaking the sliders and it’ll update live and you can see what the results are.
And then if you see something that you like, then try out baking that to a geo channel, if you’re familiar with geo channels. If you’re not familiar with geo channels, just bake that straight to a paint node and then use that as a mask either in your node graph or you could use that as a paint layer in your layer stack as well. You would have to connect it up correctly to do that, but that’s a very simple process as well, and we do have videos on that. And then I would just have a go at putting that into the material and having a look at how I can use curvature to mask the edges of a metal and get that nice little breakup.
I wouldn’t want somebody to think, ‘I’m going to have to go look up all of these different masks, all these different maps individually. I’m going to have to find out what an AO is.’ There’s a lot of mathematics behind everything. And I do think unfortunately, math is important in learning texturing, however, you can learn so much just by playing with it and seeing what comes out the other end.
b&a: In the overview video and in The Bakery tutorial and the Mari splash screen, I really liked the use of that alien woman asset. Is that something that Foundry already had or was it developed bespoke for showcasing this new feature?
Charli Holt: It was developed specifically for Mari 7.0. She’s called the Sky Goddess. She was created by an artist at ILM called Ellie Dupont. Ellie was just incredible to work with. The marketing team put together a mood board of the vibe they wanted and then came to me and discussed it and asked if there were any artists that I knew of who would be able to do this sort of thing. They had used a picture of one of Ellie’s previous works in that mood board and I was like, ‘Well, you’ve got Ellie Dupont’s work there, so let’s reach out to Ellie.’ And fortunately, Ellie was very eager to work with us.
It’s something that we’re trying to do more in Mari and our other products as well. We’re very eager to start reaching out to artists and getting their work to promote Mari instead of just a normal splash screen with an abstract shape, that sort of thing. We really want to highlight what Mari does, as well as focus on the artist using it.
b&a: Just finally, we talked about the name, but what about The Bakery icon, which is the oven? That’s very fun, too.
Charli Holt: That actually has a long story behind it because we went through many different buttons and we were getting a lot of feedback. Originally, the button was a cupcake, which the Mari team decided looked a little bit inappropriate (💩), so they refused to put it in. Then they decided it was going to be like a bread loaf with steam coming off it, which then rolled out in the alpha and beta, and then customers picked up on us having a repeat 💩 incident.
Then the design team came back to us with about 10 different icons that were ranging between oven gloves, a slice of cake with cherries on top, and your standard oven. We decided the pizza oven looked awesome. We actually took a little vote internally and also with the individual who had said that the bread looked like the 💩– we made him vote on the icon as well. It was unanimous that everybody liked the pizza oven, which has been awesome because we have a lot of internal jokes about pizza as well in the Mari team.
We have a developer who no longer works in the Mari team, but is still at Foundry, who is Italian and loves the final icon. So he was like, ‘Oh, this is a dedication to me! Bakery is just a dedication to my Mari legacy…’.
I think it works really, really well. What we were struggling with was getting something that represented baking, and I think with the cupcake and the loaf of bread, they didn’t read from a distance. When you’ve got quite large resolution monitors, the icons could be quite small. So it’s great to see how that’s worked out. We all love it now.
Find out more about Mari 7.0 here.
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