The Foundry’s lighting tool KATANA 2 has been rebuilt to form an
integral component of VFX pipelines, capable of managing complex
content, faster iteration and interoperability.
The Foundry’s KATANA 2 Lights the Way to VFX Pipeline Integration |
The Foundry has released KATANA 2, substantially rebuilt to move it from a specialized look development and lighting tool to an integral component of a working visual effects pipeline, capable of managing complex content. Consequently, as well as supportingfaster iteration, KATANA 2 also emphasisesinteroperability. |
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KATANA 2 now has a moreresponsive user interface, and a new public API -Op API, its new core software engine. Ops, or operators, are the core processing unit of theGeolib3library for efficiently loading and processing the scene graph’s locations and attributes. Ops can both generate new scene graph locations and process incoming attributes – replacing the Scene Graph Generators and Attribute Modifiers that previous versions of KATANA used. TheOp APIallows users to write plug-ins to create and modify scene data and, in practice, no distinction is made between scene graph generation and modification. The code you need to write for the Op API is also much simpler than before because it is event-driven and works with the new engine’s asynchronous processing. With this API, artists can createclients- using either C++ or Python - that can ask for scene graph data from any Op at any location and receive an event when the data is ready, or persistently observe a location and receive an event when data changes. |
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Another scripting update is support formaths operations. For example, artists can write scripts for KATANA 2 to carry out processing of geometry and transforms that includes matrix and vector mathematical operations, due to access to Industrial Light & Magic’s industry-standardImath libraryto use in OpScripts. A major change to KATANA 2 isGraph State Variables, used to increase efficiency and reduce the need for project segmentation. GSVs let artists set nodes to change their behaviour based on the context in which the scene is being evaluated at any given time – that is, depending on which shot within a sequence, or which pass within a shot, is being rendered. In other words, you can now use Graph State Variables to control which nodes in the node graph contribute to scene graph processing, based on the Variables’ values. Their key concept is that the Variables can be set either at a global, whole-project level, such as a variable for the shot number in a sequence that is being worked on, or at a local level using VariableSet nodes, for example, for a variable that indicates which render pass is being evaluated. |
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KATANA 2 has faster, more stable and easier to useLive Rendering, for both lighting and look development. Users can restrict and modify updates to specific parts of the scene graph for better interactivity, even while the Live Render is in progress. Artists can modify Interactive Render Filters in the middle of a Live Render, as well as set custom options for each renderer directly in the Node Graph. Atechnical guideto KATANA 2, including the Op API, GeoLib3 and Graph State Variables, for pipeline developers can be foundhere. www.thefoundry.co.uk |