Mari vs Surface Labs

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.

Surface Labs is a node-based application for building procedural textures and materials by connecting operations in a graph. Its node library includes generators, filters, blends, transforms, normals, channel operations, and math nodes. A GLSL editor supports custom nodes that compile to the native Rust engine; the maker says most nodes render in under 2 ms. Desktop authoring supports up to 8192 × 8192 in 32-bit float, while iPadOS and Android are capped at 4096 × 4096. A headless command-line tool can evaluate graphs and export textures for batch work and CI. The built-in MCP server lets compatible assistants inspect and edit projects, render nodes, and export textures. It is opt-in, binds to loopback, requires a generated token, and rejects non-local Origins, but file arguments can access files available to the user account rather than staying within a project directory. A portable project file bundles materials, subgraphs, images, fonts, a preview model, and export settings. Surface Labs is free while in early access; its iPad build is distributed through TestFlight, where builds expire on the usual 90-day cycle.