The Foundry reveals details of its commercial plans for Katana, an environment for preparing 3D assets for rendering, initially developed alongside Sony Pictures Imageworks.
The software was originally developed at the film studio to handle increasingly complex workflows on productions such as Spider-Man and Superman Returns.
The commercial development was taken on by The Foundry in late 2009.
The aim is to provide a flexible product that can be used with any pipeline and renderer at any facility. The alpha edition of the tool is already being used by the likes of MPC and Digital Domain.
“We are excited to see KATANA cutting its teeth outside the halls of Imageworks and becoming available for artists and facilities everywhere,” says Sony Pictures Imageworks CTO Rob Bredow.
“The Foundry is a tremendous partner and by broadening the adoption of KATANA and product support, a new generation of artists and productions can benefit from this innovative production-proven technology.”
Katana aims to enable both large and small facilities the ability to build highly scalable lighting pipelines without any large internal engineering effort.
There were originally concerns when The Foundry took over that Katana’s place in the market would overlap with its other tool, Nuke. But when The Foundry’s Andy Lomas released an update on Katana’s development over the summer, he announced the after consultation with other facilities, the application would be standalone.
In order to separate the tool from Nuke, The Foundry continued to work with Sony Pictures Imageworks to establish the tool as a base to enhance the capabilities of Nuke, and in particular using Katana to translate between Nuke and RenderMan. “Using KATANA as a base enables us to support a number of other production renderers in the future, leveraging its render-agnostic approach to handling 3D scene data,” said Lomas.
Katana is due for commercial release in 2011.
Posted on Tuesday, January 4th, 2011 at 1:08 pm under News, Products. You can subscribe to comments. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.
Tags: 3D assets, Katana, look development, Nuke, scene assembly, software, Sony Pictures Imageworks, The Foundry
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