Foundry has announced the release of Katana, its look development and lighting software. New features include a new artist focused lighting mode that combines several new workflows with the aim of giving artists a more similar approach to that of a live-action cinematographer. The mode supports the creation and editing of lights directly on top of a rendered image in Katana’s viewer with gestures.
Katana 4.0also introduces foresight rendering workflows, a feature that allows artists to work simultaneously with renders from multiple shots, frames, assets, asset variations and other tasks from within one Katana project file. This release also supports networked machines to provide fast and scalable rendering feedback
USD is improved with an updated Katana Hydra bridge, USD preview surface support and USD material export provide better fidelity and performance in Katana’s Hydra viewer, while making Katana well suited to drive look development for a Hydra Viewer or final render to all other departments.
Find out more on Foundry’s website
For some reason this software feels incredibly obsolete to me. They’re showcasing things which were standard a decade ago as a shiny new features and rendering performance in their showcase videos seems to be quite underwhelming as well.
While we may not yet be at the point of a realtime rendering in offline renderer quality, we are certainly at least at the point of interactive rendering with realtime framerates. So seeing oldschool things like switching to unshaded view for the duration of making any scene changes, or seeing pictures that take multiple dozens of seconds to converge to something clean enough to see the effect of those changes seems almost embarrassing.
I am aware Katana is just a host for variety of renderers, many of which are up to today’s standards, but the marketing team did quite a poor job on these videos: https://youtu.be/RcU4pqwEmTc?t=44
No one should have to watch something as incredibly trivial as a car model on a plane lit by a single area light render slowly bucket by bucket in the 3rd decade of 21st century.
I always perceived Katana as that heavy duty, big VFX house tool, but after seeing this, it’s hard to be left with an impression other than that some of the big VFX uses quite obsolete tools.
it `s so sad. I heard.
I work with this software. Despite what foundry claims, it sucks. Every edit is a pain and everything takes forever. The software is unpolished. The scripting module is chaos and undocumented.
Yes, that’s pretty much along the lines of what I heard from others privately too 🙂
Houdini solaris is the replacement for this?
I have no idea, probably. I’ve never ever ran into a scenario of such a complex scene assembly it would require some special, external, standalone software to handle that.
I mean there are certain DCC packages really bad at complex scene assembly and management, but those are rather exceptions to a rule.
Yes, Houdini with Solaris is most likely one of the best alternatives, but I haven’t looked at it.
Katana feels either like a solution in search of a problem or a tool intended to brute force through the unoptimized content created by masses of low skill and low paid artists, but it seems to be failing at that too.
Clarisse Builder is Katana’s direct competitor.
Yes, and Image Engine’s Gaffer. Which is a great open source alternative.
Its quite a bit simpler than Solaris (thankfully) but still quite capable.
gafferhq.org/
“Image Engine Gaffer” can make a difficult scene so that it doesn’t crash?