Introducing MARI 1.5, the 3D texturing tool behind Star Wars 1313

You know those impressive visuals we've seen in the latest Star Wars 1313 trailers and screenshots? A lot of that has something to do with MARI 1.5, a new version of The Foundry's 3D digital paint tool.

Just released, LucasArts has already been harnessing the power of the MARI 1.5 with production on their latest game Star Wars 1313. The highly-anticipated game has looked so impressive, visually, that it has begun to draw speculation that it could release on next-gen consoles.

“Integrating MARI at LucasArts for Star Wars 1313 helped us work a lot more efficiently and contributed to making the game visually stunning," said LucasArts visual effects supervisor Kim Libreri.

So what exactly does MARI 1.5 do? In short, it allows artists to "spend more time being creative and less time managing technical issues". For the more complex features, it includes Overlapping UV support, Maya texture export, shadow support, DDS Cubemap support, among the many other additions.

"MARI allows us to create more realistic assets using techniques similar to those we use at ILM for our movies," Libreri added. "It’s also been a real benefit that the texture artists are able to preview assets in real-time so they can interact with them and see exactly how they are going to look in-game.”