Learn Mari texture mapping and 3D painting by Michael Cox

11 hours, 64 lessons, zero fluff. Texture Director Michael Cox walks you through Mari the way it is actually used on film – from project setup to environments, guns, and full creatures ready for render.

🎯 What you’ll learn

• Set up Mari projects, navigate the UI, and configure lighting and caching
• Use projection workflows, channels, layers, and non-destructive painting
• Texture natural environments, rocks, trees, and ceramics
• Build procedural shaders with Mari node graphs
• Create and bake hard-surface materials for firearms and props
• Paint realistic skin with subsurface scattering, oil, and specular maps
• Export production-ready maps for film and TV pipelines

✅ Requirements

• Skills: Basic understanding of 3D concepts, no prior Mari experience required
• Tools: Mari, 3-button mouse
• Hardware: PC or Mac with 16GB+ RAM, dedicated GPU with 4GB+ VRAM recommended

📝 Description

If you have opened Mari and felt lost, this course fixes that fast. Michael starts with the boring-but-important stuff – projects, channels, navigation, caching – then gets you painting right away. Short explanations, then straight to practical examples.

The middle section is all about real jobs. You will texture rocks, trees, and ceramics, plan with references, and keep your layers clean when things get messy. Then you switch to nodes and build procedural shaders you can actually art-direct, plus push renders through the Mari-MODO Bridge to check your work.

Then it gets fun. Hard-surface section covers firearms and props with advanced node graphs, baking, and plugins that save hours on edge wear and surface breakup. You learn how to keep the graph readable and how to export clean, production-ready maps without breaking your renderer.

The last part is creatures. Fish, skin, organic stuff. Michael shows how to sell realism with subsurface scattering, oil and specular maps, and fine detail layering. No magic button talk – just variation, reference, and control so your creature does not look like plastic.

🧑‍🎓 Who this course is for

• 3D modelers and texture artists who want Mari in their toolkit for film and TV work
• Look-development artists and digital painters moving from Substance or Photoshop to UDIM-based hero texturing

🧑‍🏫 About the Author

Michael Cox is a Texture Director with more than 20 years in features, including time at Weta Digital, Digital Domain, and Base FX. His credits include Avatar, X-Men: First Class, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and The Adventures of Tintin.

He teaches like a lead, not a lecturer. Expect production habits, linear workflow tips, and straight answers on what actually holds up in film pipelines and what falls apart at render time.

🏁 Final Result

• Finished set of portfolio assets: textured environment pieces, a hard-surface firearm prop with baked maps, and a biological creature with full skin shading – all organized and exported for presentation and rendering.

📢 Guys, this is a Group Buy campaign, check the GBC forum thread to get access

You can find the course preview in the download section below.