Archive republication: This article was originally published on 10 February 2021. It has been translated into English and lightly updated for clarity while preserving the original reporting and context.
This article originally appeared in Digital Production 05 : 2018.
The Foundry’s professional lighting and look development software Katana has been available as a release build in version 3.O since April 2O18 and two major features are being emphasised. Firstly, there is the close connection between Katana and the renderer 3Delight. 3Delight is also installed during the installation of Katana. Also touted is the new viewport, which is based on Pixar’s Hydra technology, Pixar’s open-sub-div-based real-time rendering architecture, which is also part of Pixar’s Universal Scene Description project. For users, this means that full scenes are loaded more quickly.
The first interested parties were able to take a look at version 3.0 of Katana at the end of February 2018. The Foundry held a special event in Montreal for this purpose. The speakers were from The Foundry itself, Aghiles Kheffache, CTO of 3Delight, and Peter Nofz, CTO of Rodeo FX. During the programme, Katana 3.0 was shown and the future viability of the software was discussed.
The first steps
The first presentation was given by Jordan Thistlewood, Senior Product Manager for Lighting and Look Development at The Foundry. There were three areas of particular focus to optimise Katana for the release of version 3.0 and beyond.
Probably the most important areas are firstly the integrated rendering and secondly the improvement of the user experience. According to Thistlewood, the aim was to be faster in the processing of data sets – which should always be the goal of software manufacturers. Furthermore, a standard should be created for rendering and interactive previews, regardless of the fact that large studios have their own renderers that they can still connect to. A close partnership with 3Delight has been established for this purpose.
The third area was dedicated to increasing the general performance of the software. Here it is good to know that, in contrast to earlier versions where the scene graph and the user interface were single-threaded, the developers are now focussing on multi-threading and the gradual adaptation of elements to this.
For Katana, this means that the entire user interface has been brought into focus for improvements, as well as the user’s interaction with the Hydra Viewer.
Hail Hydra!
The Hydra Viewer really packs a punch – Thistlewood speaks of a viewport that is seven to ten times faster than the standard Open Scene Graph Viewer. Less interesting for packshots, but a very welcome step for large productions.
The new Hydra Viewer has further advantages: It is equipped with menus on the left and top that control the new gizmo in the viewer itself. There is a new gizmo that is much easier to recognise and, in addition to the normal axes for manipulation, now also offers planar surfaces as well as a visual axis as a preview. You can switch between object and world space with a click and several objects can be moved simultaneously.
In addition to the ability to manipulate multiple objects in the Hydra Viewer, there is also a new Look-At tool that makes it easier for users to fine-tune lights and cameras in the scene. The tool is activated at the touch of a button and a target object appears along with its own clearly visible gizmo.
The Hydra grows more necks
A first feature is interactive Screen Space Ambient Occlusion as a viewing mode to give complex geometry a better display form without negatively affecting performance.
The Hydra Viewer is also based on instancing. Users can now display all instances contained in the scene hierarchy in the viewport and work with individual instances. The special feature is the smooth operation in the Hydra Viewer without jerking – Thistlewood always speaks of butter-smooth work, even when the number of instances is in the tens of thousands. In the test version, the instances were displayed as bounding boxes and no object with geometry was displayed.
3Delight as a partner
Another special feature from Katana 3.0 is the fixed integration of the 3Delight renderer. This means that users now have the option of using interactive preview rendering – almost like the interactive preview rendering in the Arnold plug-in. This allows The Foundry to concentrate more on optimising Katana, and on the rendering side there is a six-man team that takes care of rendering.
The renderer 3Delight is now twenty years old – the company started when scanline rendering was very popular. Back then, the features were based on Renderman, with some improvements of course. Today there are numerous alternatives, so 3Delight had to fundamentally reorganise itself. A separate API for scene description has now been developed (NSI API). OSL, the open source project from Sony Pictures Imageworks under the direction of Larry Gritz, and the standard path tracing tool Monte Carlo are also integral components.
Exciting ideas have been incorporated into the new features for 3Delight in Katana. This can be seen in the Multi Light Output without negative side effects – something we are already used to when working with the Corona renderer. OpenVDB datasets can be used as light sources if they provide attributes for this. The background to this is that glowing areas within materials can be used as light sources. One feature that Kheffache is particularly proud of is called perception-based parameterisation. This is a user interface whose changes are controlled by the artist in such a way that visual results are not negatively affected. As an example, he cites volumetric materials with scattering and absorption parameters whose changes do not represent the intended visual effect, but instead depict physical processes without being able to directly control the end result.
The future of Katana
Much has been said about the future of Katana and a first prototype of Katana was presented in which ray tracing was activated in the viewport – albeit with a loss of speed, but the direction is clear. Furthermore, ray tracing in the viewport should be possible with any rendering plug-in.
Another piece of news was pleasing. It is not yet clear which version and which update is meant, but Katana is to be equipped with the first tools for modelling – help came from the Modo development team at this point. The primary reason for this is to provide lighting artists with tools to create shadow casters. Pixar’s Renderman also allows users to freely use light blockers to simplify the placement of shadows as an artistic element.
So what do the changes mean for users and potential new users? There is growing pressure to make the software more intuitive and to adapt complexity through appealing tools and other user interfaces.
If you look at the Corona renderer for 3ds Max and Cinema 4D, it was already clear that it was time to provide digital artists with better tools. This can be seen in Corona’s Virtual Frame Buffer.
