LONDON — Foundry (www.foundry.com) has announced updates to Katana, its flagship look development and lighting tool. Version 3.1 incorporates a range of updates that will enable artists to achieve more complex and creative results faster.
The new release offers improved 3D scene processing performance, drastically reducing time to first pixel for multi-threaded renderer plug-ins. Due to improvements in Katana’s Alembic library, multi-threading rendering plug-ins can be up to 5x faster than with Katana 3.0, which was already up to 10x faster than Katana 2.6.
Katana 3.1 incorporates the next generation of the 3DelightNSI rendering plug-in, which has added a host of improvements, including high volume rendering speeds and quality. The latest update also brings fast multiple scattering support, as well as a new 3Delight Principled shader. Live rendering via 3DelightNSI in Katana remains very interactive and artist-friendly.
Foundry is introducing a number of upgrades to increase the efficiency and usability of the viewport launched in Katana 3.0. Common tasks are now accessible by hotkeys and facesets support shader assignment. It is now more powerful and the new UX touches make it easier for artists to use.
This version now uses Qt5 UI library and OpenSubDiv 3.1 to bring Katana into full compliance with the VFXRP 2017 standard. Now all studios have access to all key media and entertainment products which use the same set of code libraries. This will make working with Katana in a pipeline easier.
The launch of Katana 3.1 coincides with the product’s seventh anniversary, taking place throughout November.
“Katana has been and continues to be a labor of love for us,” says Jordan Thistlewood, group product manager at Foundry. “It’s fitting that we release Katana 3.1 in the same month seven years after the release of Katana 1.0. We’re thrilled with the performance improvements and UX updates in this release as they will have a strong impact for the artists that use the software daily. The update to 3DelightNSI is super exciting with both performance and artist-focused improvements. The only thing more exciting is our ongoing plans for Katana in 2019.”