LigidPainter vs Mari

LigidPainter is free 3D texturing software for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It generates seamless materials and textures for selected material channels or processes all channels automatically. Artists can paint directly on models or in a 2D scene with custom brushes, normal-map and filter painting, vectoral painting, and XYZ mirroring. Its material workflow includes albedo, roughness, metallic, normal, height, and ambient-occlusion textures, with procedural materials, PBR workflows, and node-based authoring. Projects are stored as folders, allowing saved textures to be retrieved there or exported. The itch.io listing identifies version 3.0.0 and describes the application as in development; its download page offers a 194 MB Windows 64-bit MSI. The maker’s build guide describes Windows and Unix-like builds and lists OpenAL, Freetype, and zlib as required binaries. The license permits unchanged binary redistribution with attribution but prohibits selling it and restricts source-code use.

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.