Knald vs Mari

Knald is a standalone GPU-powered application for generating textures from polygon meshes and 2D sources such as photographs and heightmaps. Its Baker creates textures from high-to-low polygon meshes, while Color To Normals turns images or heightmaps into normal maps for processing in the Integrator. Documented outputs include normal, derivative, displacement or height, ambient occlusion, transmission, concavity, and convexity maps. Knald supports texture baking and physically based rendering workflows. Processing uses single- and double-precision floating point and handles 8-, 16-, and 32-bit image data. The company describes it as suitable for physically based pipelines in interactive work, visual arts, and product design. A supported OpenCL-compatible GPU is required. Listed compatibility is limited to 64-bit Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10. The 30-day demo costs nothing (30-day demo). The Freelancer License costs $100 as a one-time purchase; it covers qualifying individuals or businesses with no more than one director, officer, manager, member, or employee, and permits installation on up to two devices owned by the licensee. The Studio License costs $200 as a one-time purchase.

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.