Broadcast Software Rendering Katana

Katana

KATANA is a look development and lighting tool, replacing the conventional CG pipeline with a flexible recipe based asset workflow. KATANA is built from the ground up with the needs of modern productions in mind. Its node based approach allows rapid turn around of high complexity shots while keeping artists in control and reducing in house development overheads. Extensive APIs mean it integrates with a variety of renderers and your pre- existing shader libraries and workflow tools, whilst it's collaborative nature means it scales to meet the needs of even the most demanding CG Features and VFX films.

Originally developed at Sony Pictures Imageworks, KATANA has been production proven on over 20 shows since 2004 and is specifically designed to address the needs of highly 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

Deal with potentially unlimited levels of complexity

KATANA provides a very general framework for efficient look development and lighting, but it also allows extreme flexibility by enabling all scene data presented to a renderer to be inspected and processed by procedural operations and filters.

In November 2009 The Foundry and Sony Pictures Imageworks entered into a technology sharing agreement to collaborate on the development of KATANA, with planned release as a product in 2011. The Foundry is also making use of KATANA technology in a number of other Foundry products.

 Manufacturer:The Foundry