LOS ANGELES — London-based Foundry (www.foundry.com) has announced that the newly redesigned and Nodal Scene Interface (NSI) powered 3Delight (www.3delight.com) will be available as a free plug-in for Katana 3.0 interactive renders when it ships later this year.
3Delight is powered by NSI, which is both nodal and hierarchical, allowing for fully interactive live rendering. 3Delight is aimed at refining look development and lighting tasks to enhance the artist experience. Workflows such as the plug-in’s light mixer technology allows artists to render final quality images and adjust lighting interactively, while the edits are fed back directly to lights or groups of lights in Katana’s GafferThree lighting tools. The fully OSL-based shading engine is compatible with both Katana and Maya, allowing for the direct transfer of look development files between the DCC apps. The geometry based lighting frees an artist to execute lighting with straightforward real world techniques.
According to Foundry, key benefits include: Fast, physically based rendering technology with open shading language (OSL) at its core; fully interactive live rendering and a real-time light mixer, especially well-suited for Katana's workflow; material nodes that are 100 percent compatible with the Maya version; the ability to use fur/hair and displacements extensively with negligible impact on performance; better quality rendering with perfectly smooth subdivision surfaces and network caching for efficient network utilization by automatic scene dependency localization.
“We are very excited to offer Katana 3.0 with 3Delight as an out-of-the-box rendering solution,” says Jordan Thistlewood, senior product manager for look development and lighting at Foundry. “This provides new users with a ‘download and explore’ experience and our existing users with a very powerful option for their pipelines. Multiverse, 3Delight and Katana combine to offer a complete Maya and Katana pipeline solution. Working with the 3Delight team has been great and we are really impressed how far they have stretched the interactive look development, lighting and rendering experience in Katana.”
3Delight will be available as a free plug-in for Katana 3.0, at no additional cost for new or existing users for interactive renders. Katana 3.0 with 3Delight is being showcased at SIGGRAPH 2017 as part of a public beta. Combined Katana/3Delight render licenses for production rendering will be available for purchase, with pricing to be announced at a later date.