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When comparing Mari vs ArmorPaint, the Slant community recommends ArmorPaint for most people. In the question“What are the best 3D texture painting softwares?” ArmorPaint is ranked 4th while Mari is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose ArmorPaint is:
ArmorPaint allows artists to paint across multiple maps at once. This allows for easy creation of coherent color, roughness, and bump maps.
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Free Trial
Though it is expensive, if you wish to use it continuously you can constantly renew your trial with lovely fake emails. Learning this can benefit your career into games or film.
Pro FIlm Industry Usage
Though Substance Painter is catching up to Mari in terms of texturing wiht higher res textures, this program is what is used in tandem with Zbrush most commonly in Film. For the Game industry it is Substance Painter and Zbrush.
Pro Great at handling large texture sets
Mari can handle 32K textures since 2010. It was used in creating the characters faces and such in the Avatar movie, as close-ups require such high-res textures.
Pro Paint on multiple maps at once
ArmorPaint allows artists to paint across multiple maps at once. This allows for easy creation of coherent color, roughness, and bump maps.
Pro Entirely GPU-run
Supports GPU acceleration. Since it is run entirely on the gpu, it makes painting huge maps nice and smooth on modern graphic cards.
Pro Node-based brushes
A simple and robust "blender-based" node system to modify brush channels.
Pro Open-Source
ArmorPaint falls under the zlib license. The zlib license has been approved by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) as a free software license, and by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) as an open-source license. It is compatible with the GNU General Public License. As such, the program is FREE if you compile it from source, and (as of August 2, 2020) costs only €16 to purchase pre-compiled binaries.
Pro Epic MegaGrant's recipient
ArmorPaint received a $25,000 Epic Mega Grant. This is a large donation of money given by Epic Games through their MegaGrant Program to programs that show great promise. These grants are unconditional and recipients are expected to continue program development as they see fit. These grants can not be used to purchase unpurchasable software (open-source software).
Cons
Con The most expensive one yet
Not made for hobbyists or indie game developers.
Con Eye wateringly expensive and inaccessible like all their products
Con Not object oriented
Con It's NOT free (even though it's open-source)
Armor Paint is open-source, but the official binaries are not available for free.
Unless you can compile it yourself, or you run Arch Linux or a system based on it and can use an AUR package that'll build it for you - you'll have to pay to use this program.
Con Beta
It is not completed yet, which may lead to support drop, or a software that is not entirely usable.
Con No lossless upscaling of brush strokes
When exporting your maps in higher resolutions in Substance Painter - it'll re-draw all your strokes in the background to make sure the exported textures have as much detail as possible. Armor Paint doesn't have such a feature so far - if you paint on a small resolution texture - you're stuck with it, or you'll have to manually re-paint it yourself to get a higher resolution texture.
Con No projection on normals
The brushes are projected with a simple viewport projection, which can lead to weird warping of the brush on irregular surfaces.
