London - Leading visual effects software developer The Foundry has released Katana 1.0, a look development and lighting tool in which the conventional CG pipeline is replaced with a flexible recipe-based asset workflow. Further, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), a Lucasfilm Company, has purchased a site license of Katana.
Currently in use for upcoming productions, ILM made this significant investment to boost their production pipeline across its ILM and Lucasfilm companies. As a Katana site license holder, ILM will deploy the software in its San Francisco and Singapore studios.
Katana is specifically designed to address the needs of a 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.
Katana is built from the ground up with the needs of modern productions in mind. Extensive APIs mean it integrates with current pipelines, shader libraries, and workflow tools, whereas its collaborative nature allows it to scale to meet the needs of even demanding productions.
Katana has the ability to produce complicated shots while allowing artists to retain control.