It is the second product that the company has offered for non-commercial use to artists having previously made its Nuke compositing, editorial and finishing software available in the same manner.

“With our non-commercial products, we want to give artists all the time they need to get familiar with the software.

“They can work on personal projects such as making their demo reels stand out from the crowd, or simply use our extensive free tutorials to thoroughly learn the software-for as long as it takes,” said Andy Whitmore, chief product officer at The Foundry.

Mari non-commercial enables artists to use paint tools to texture 3D meshes for VFX, animation and games projects directly in the 3D environment, and offers layering, adjustments, procedurals and advanced masking.

However, users of the non-commercial version of the software won’t have access to all of the features of the full version of Mari.

Python scripting is disabled and export texture resolution size is limited to 4K and 16-bit colour per channel. Export formats are also limited to .psd, .png, .tga, .jpg and .jpeg.

There is a limit of six UV texture patches per object, but unlimited channels and layers. Users will be able to work with a maximum of five objects at once.