New tools watch: MARI

Lately - particularly since the demise of the late, lamented XSI, I've been increasingly worried about getting too locked in to any one vendor for my tools.  I go way back with Photoshop - I once emailed a bug report directly to John Knoll on my Compuserve (!!) account.  I was in the audience for the Maya launch at SIGGRAPH in, I think it was 1997.

Jeez, I'm really fricking old. But I digress.

The point is, I love those tools. They've been part of my life for a long time. But I don't like being too beholden to anybody, especially not an anybody who's a big public company that has to answer to shareholders and analysts and is not particularly worried about competition.

For that reason I'm actively looking for alternatives to supplement or even supplant the old standbys.  And this GDC gave me some up-close and personal time with a very promising one: Mari, the 3-d painting app from the Foundry.

Lots of Mari work on Avatar

More after the jump.