The Foundry has announced the commercial release of its newest product, Katana 1.0. The look development and lighting tool is designed for the needs of modern productions. Originally developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks, KATANA 1.0 replaces the conventional CG pipeline with a flexible recipe based asset workflow. The Application Programming Interface (API) of Katana allows integration with current pipelines, shader libraries and workflow tools.
It is specifically designed to address the needs of a highly scalable asset based workflow to:
- Allow updating of assets once shots are already in progress.
- Share lighting set-ups, such as edits and overrides, between shots and sequences.
- Allow use of multiple renderers and specifying dependencies between render passes.
- Allow shot specific modification of assets to become part of the lighting 'recipe' for shots to avoid having to deal with large numbers of shot specific asset variants.
Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), a Lucasfilm Company, has purchased a site licence and is already employing KATANA on upcoming productions. Which means that about Katana we will hear more in the future.
For more info visit: The Foundry