Forge Material Studio vs Mari

Forge Material Studio is a local-first tool for authoring procedural PBR materials on the web or Windows. Its node graph builds tileable materials from components such as cloud noise, Voronoi, gradients, bricks, math, blending, and normal nodes. It can also convert PNG, JPEG, or WebP albedo images into editable base-color, height, normal, roughness, metallic, and ambient-occlusion maps. A live Babylon.js preview shows materials on a sphere, cube, plane, or production-style model, with full-result and channel views. Work can be done at 512, 1024, or 2048 pixels while preserving the source aspect ratio. Projects are stored in IndexedDB with recovery, generated-map caching, undo and redo, and keyboard save shortcuts. Exports include individual PNG maps or validated .mmpack packages with baked maps, the source graph, a manifest, and an export report. The standalone viewer opens these packages in browser memory. The tool has no account system, telemetry, or material upload service. It is free under the MIT License, which permits commercial use if the copyright and license notice remain with the software.

Mari is a 3D painting package for high-resolution texturing and look development in visual effects, animation, and games. Artists can preview projection-paint changes in context before committing them across texture maps. Its UDIM workflow supports thousands of textures per model, with each texture up to 32K × 32K pixels; the Multi-Channel Paint node can paint up to eight streams at once. Mari’s Bakery bakes geometry maps, including curvature and occlusion, across multiple objects and UDIMs. Pipeline support includes OpenColorIO, OpenSubdiv, FBX, Alembic, APIs, and Python scripting, with shaders for 3Delight, VRay, Unreal, and Arnold. Listed systems are Windows 11 64-bit and Linux 64-bit (Rocky/RHEL 9). Mari Non-commercial limits exports to 4K and 16-bit per channel, disables Python scripting, and allows at most five objects at once. Foundry offers an unrestricted 30-day trial. Individual subscriptions cost $86 a month or $689 a year, subject to applicable taxes.