ANAHEIM, CA — The Foundry (www.thefoundry.co.uk) and Pixar Animation Studios have entered a technical collaboration to bring Katana and RenderMan together, creating a proven toolset for high-end lighting and rendering.
Katana is The Foundry’s premier lighting tool, while Pixar’s RenderMan has long been recognized as a standard in visual effects and animation rendering. Both were recently used together on the Disney/Pixar short The Blue Umbrella (pictured), which is now playing in theaters with Monsters University. The successful outcome involved significant dedicated engineering effort from both parties, not only to better support RenderMan workflows, but to build new features into Katana itself.
As a result of the technology partnership, Katana will now include a full RenderMan license as standard, along with a base set of shaders and free Katana batch render licenses. The results of these efforts will be released to all customers inside future releases of Katana. The continuing developments help position Katana and RenderMan together as a proven rendering and lighting solution, though both will remain open and agnostic.