The Foundry Katana 2.5 v4

The Foundry Katana 2.5 v4

.: DESCRiPTiON :..
High-efficiency collaborative workflows
Collaboration and reuse are at the heart of KATANA®’s look development and lighting time-saving efficiencies. Using the node graph, artists work by defining a series of ordered steps, similar to a recipe. These recipes can be shared with other team members, or reused for other parts of the project.
You can also share or reuse just parts of node graphs using Live Groups which are saved as files to disk; you can manage versions of these groups, and publish changes to them from wherever they are used.
Collections let you select parts of a scene, give them a title, and then apply a set of actions to that selection; you can either make the selection manually, or using rules—the latter enables you to make node graph templates that can operate based on logic, without the requirement for artist intervention.
And finally, macros let you easily package up a set of nodes into a shareable tool—without the need for scripting—with only the necessary controls exposed to keep the interface as lightweight as possible.
Increased artist productivity
One of the biggest problems many artists face is a loss of productivity due to wait times: waiting for files to load, waiting for scenes to render. KATANA is designed to tackle this problem head on, and the result is a solution that is faster than almost any 3D application.
Project files load in a flash, so you can make changes right away; the processing of each part of the scene is deferred until you need to access it, so the UI remains responsive.
At render time, KATANA feeds all scene data to the render plug-in in an intelligent, memory-efficient manner—so you can view a fraction of your scene in the UI, while still working with the full contents in the render.
KATANA also eliminates the need to work in a vendor-specific archive file format, saving even more time; there’s no need to generate V-Ray vrscene files, Arnold ASS files, or any form of Delayed Read Archives for 3Delight or RenderMan.
Efficient lighting production
Whether you’re working on a single shot or an entire sequence, KATANA’s lighting production toolset will make sure you finish faster.
You can manage light creation, light linking, constraints and light filters from a one-stop control panel; create large sets of lights and control their intensity, color and other parameters from a single item; and build up hierarchical, inheritance-based sequence lighting. Everything is designed to save you time.
Use the Live Render mechanism to have the rendered image updated as the scene changes. With Interactive Render Filters you can override settings of interactive renders for better performance, without changing the settings for the final render.
Work with predefined color palettes as part of a pipeline. Inspect and compare your rendered images using a histogram. You can even identify what object makes up a pixel and select it in the scene graph by directly sampling the image.
Finally, create a test comp using KATANA’s built in 2D compositing engine to validate your work before sending the final frames to NUKE or your compositor of choice.
Flexible look development
KATANA’s look development toolset is designed to support your company-wide pipeline requirements, while at the same time letting individual artists work creatively.
Look files store the texturing and shading for an asset separately from the geometry, allowing each to be independently versioned and updated—so that your look development team can work in parallel with your lighting team, for example.
Material nodes store parameters for the surface, displacement or light shaders from each render plug-in. For more rich and complex looks, network materials let you combine textures, procedurals and shaders by connecting multiple shading nodes. If required, each node can be connected to multiple render plug-in shaders at the same time, making it much easier to support a multi-renderer pipeline project.
Template materials can be easily saved as a material library for reuse as references; together with the ability to instance materials as children that inherit selected parameters from the parent material, they help to ensure a high-quality, consistent look across the production.
Powerful scene management
With lighting sitting at the end of the 3D pipeline, KATANA acts as the supplier of all the necessary data to the renderer; this requires a lot of scene management, for which KATANA is robustly equipped.
KATANA’s scene graph represents a unique path to each object in a 3D scene; its multi-threaded LUA-based OpScript language lets TDs make tools to manage those scene graph locations, adding or changing attributes or even changing the scene itself. Alongside this, Python-based Attribute Script nodes can also change the state of a 3D asset as it passes through the node graph. Meanwhile, a regular expression language, CEL, lets you set up rules to control which parts of the scene a node changes.
From an artist’s standpoint, KATANA’s 12 different types of constraints can be used to ensure objects are in the right places. Finally, working sets and scene graph bookmarks give artists control over the interactive state of their session; bookmarks can be saved to disk and shared between team members.
Pipeline and color management
KATANA is built to be a team player; to TDs and developers, it represents a Swiss army knife for the lighting and rendering pipeline.
Pipeline TDs will love the full set of APIs that cover many different aspects of the production process. The Asset Management API lets you connect to custom or commercial tools like ftrack and Shotgun. KATANA's Op API lets you make custom tools with the same resources as the tools created by The Foundry. The SuperTool API lets you create tools that have logic, custom UI and dynamic properties. The Renderer API and Live Render APIs let you add your own render engine using the same tools as the commercially-shipped render plug-ins. Finally, the Farm API lets you make complex connections between KATANA and any render farm with less coding.
Support for Python, LUA and C—along with powerful libraries like ILM’s Imath—provide great flexibility for any level of pipeline developer. The Python script editor has a rich tab completion system to aid in coding and learning; paired with the searchable developer docs, this helps users to get up to speed.
Finally, industry-standard OpenColorIO (OCIO) color management runs through all image-related operations in KATANA.
..: iNSTALL/REGiSTER NOTES :..
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