Mini Mari Toolkit

Welcome to the ACG Mini Mari Toolkit!

The Mini Mari Toolkit is a small collection of tools to help speed up your workflow in Mari’s nodegraph, designed to keep you in a flow state and keep you creating as fast as you can. This inaugural release I hope will be one of many as I work to share more of my tools with you. For feedback and bug reports, please contact help@ansleycg.com.

Contents

Release 1.0:

  • 6 Quick Blend Nodes
    • Screen
    • Multiply
    • Overlay
    • AddSub
    • Lighten
    • Darken
  • 5 Utility Nodes
    • Curvature Split
    • Clipping Warning
    • Alpha Shuffle
    • rgbMaskToAlpha
    • RandomColor
  • Download Package Contents:
    • Scripts folder

 

Installation

  1. Unzip the downloaded package and locate the Scripts folder inside
  2. Place the contents of this folder in your Mari/Scripts folder.
    • The default location of this folder is:
      • Windows: C:\Users\USER NAME\Documents\Mari\Scripts
      • Linux/Mac: ~/Mari/Scripts
    • If you have a custom Environment Variable for your Mari scripts, please place the contents in that directory
    • If you do not have a Scripts folder in the default location, please create on or simply copy the whole Scripts folder and it’s contents from the download package to the default location
  3. If installed correctly, upon launching Mari you will see a print-out signifying the ACG Mini Mari Toolkit has been successfully installed.
  4. If you receive an error message, please contact support at help@ansleycg.com.

 

Requirements

  • PLEASE NOTE: A FULL LICENSE of Mari is required due to Python limitations in Mari Non-Commercial.
  • The ACG Mini Mari Toolkit has not been tested on Mari versions prior to version 4. If compatibility issues arise, please contact help@ansleycg.com.

 

Features

Quick Blend Nodes

These nodes are designed to quickly combine two inputs together with commonly used blend modes and create a single output. The typical workflow is to create a merge node and set the blend mode which can be slow as you need to wait for Mari to load and update. The Quick Blend nodes are ultra light-weight nodes that can be called on the fly using the tab create menu. To “Screen” two masks together, simply select two nodes and hit TAB, type “Screen” and hit Enter.

***Please note: These nodes were designed to blend masks together rather than inputs with colour information. The algorithms used to blend the inputs together pay no attention to colourspace conversion, ie. they work linearly and without colour management. The result is returned with 0 transparency because masks require a solid alpha to operate properly. Mixing colour inputs will certainly work but may give different results than a Merge node would with Colour Management Enabled.

Input/Output Definition
Base Base Layer Input. Fully visible when Blend amount is set to 0.
Over Layer to be blended with Base. The result of the Base and Over Blend Operation is fly visible when Blend is set to 1.
Output Displays the result of the blend operation.

 

Attributes Definition
Blend Controls the mix between the result of the blend operation and the Base Layer

 

Blend Mode Algorithm Definition
Screen 1-((1-A)*(1-B)) Lightens the Base Layer by multiplying the results of inverting A and B and then inverting that result.
Multiply A*B Darkens the Base Layer by Multiplying the Base with Over layer.
Overlay if A<0.5, 2*A*B; if A>0.5,
1-(2*(1-A)*(1-B))		 The Base Layer is contrasted using values from the Over Layer based on the brightness of the Base.
If the Base is darker than mid-grey, the Over layer is multiplied and the result is multiplied by 2.
If the Base is brighter than mid-grey, the inverted results of Base and Over are multiplied together, multiplied by 2, and inverted again.
AddSub A+((B-0.5)*2) Similar to Overlay, but values are Added and Subtracted rather than Multiplied and Screened.
Lighten max(A,B) The result gives the lighter of two values when comparing Base and Over Layers.
Darken min(A,B) The result gives the darker of two values when comparing Base and Over Layers.

Utility Nodes

These Utility Nodes quickly complete common tasks, ie., isolating crevices and corners in a grey-scale Curvature map.

 

Utility Name Definition Attributes Type  Definition
Curvature Split Isolate the Crevices or Edges of a Curvature Map
Clamp bool Binds the output value to a range between 0-1. Values beyond that range are clipped
Edges bool Displays the convex edges from the curvature map in white.
Crevices bool Displays the concave crevices from the curvature map in white.
Clipping Warning Returns the incoming image with colour overlays
representing areas where the pixel values
are above or below a given threshold.
High Clip slide Upper limit of clip warning range.
Low Clip slide Lower limit of clip warning range.
High Clip Colour col Color to display when upper limit is reached.
Low Clip Colour col Color to display when lower limit is reached.
Passthrough bool Toggle the visibility of the Warning Colours.
Alpha Shuffle Returns the Alpha Channel of an Image.
Output Alpha is set to 1.
Blend slide Mixes between the full luminance of the Result and 0.
rgbMaskToAlpha Converts an rgbMask input to a black and white image.
Method list Operation type to convert RGB to a single A Channel
– Add R + G + B; Three channels are simply added together. The result is clamped 0-1.
– Mix Each channel is mixed with the others, effectively similar to a Screen operation.
– Add Unclamped The same as ‘Add’ but with an unclamped result.
Random Colour Returns a psuedo-random colour.
Adjust the Random Seed slider to generatedifferent colour values.
Random Colour Seed slide Selects a value to use as a seed to generate random values for RGB Channels.

Support

For all support needs, bug reports, feedback and comments, please contact ansleycg@gmail.com

ACG Mini Mari Toolkit ©AnsleyCG, Stuart Ansley 2021,