In this tutorial I will go over PBR texturing in Mari 4 using ONLY the nodegraph. Using the node graph opens up a huge amount of flexibility and allows you to work non destructively.

The idea behind this workflow is to recreate the workflow of substance inside of Mari. I use the newest extension pack in this tutorial however if you do not have access to the extension pack you can still follow along just fine with the standard Mari nodes. (Note: Most VFX studios use the extension pack so I would highly reccomend using it while following along with this tutorial.)

Once the texturing is complete we will take our textures into Maya and go over the look development process where we create a production ready master shader by using custom RGB masks to blend all our painted channels together. For this section we will be using Arnold 5 but any rendering engine that can blend materials will work just fine.

RGB masks are a very important part of texturing as they allow you to refine and dial in your shaders within a game engine or rendering egine. Not only that but they are often used in during the compositing phase in VFX.