Mari vs MeshCoat

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.

MeshCoat is free 3D texture-painting software for game developers and 3D artists. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, operates locally, needs no account or subscription and loads textures from folders on disk. Brush strokes are mapped from 3D camera space into UV coordinates in real time with hardware-accelerated shaders. A non-destructive layer stack supports hiding, reordering, opacity changes, duplication, merging and live blending. Tools include brush, stamp, eraser, fill bucket, effects brush, eyedropper and face selection. Edge-wear and crevice-dirt generators provide real-time previews with colour presets. A screen-space stencil displays reference images for painting or decal projection, and a texture shelf browses local PNG and JPG files. MeshCoat imports OBJ, GLB and glTF models and exports composite maps as PNG. The maker says composite results update at 60 FPS, with 100-step undo and redo. The app is in development, contains no telemetry or network calls, and has no runtime AI or machine-learning models. It is licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later and accepts optional contributions.