In nuce: The Foundry, the developer of software for the creative industries, has released Katana 6.0. Katana is a software for look development and lighting. Paul Denhard, Senior Product Manager at The Foundry, is pleased to announce that Katana 6.0 has further streamlined workflows – even in the case of “large volumes of work and tight timeframes.” According to the press release, Katana 6.0 is aligned with the VFX Reference Platform 2022 and USD 22.05.

In toto: New features include the Performance and Material Solo tabs, which are designed to speed up manual tasks and workflows for artists. These and other new features follow below.

Katana 6.0 | Feature Overview

Debug and Optimise Projects With The Performance Tab | Katana 6.0 Tutorial

Katana 6.0 | Optimise Your Scenes and Projects with The Performance Tab

• Performance tab: Thanks to this, artists should have an easier overview of the size of their 3D scenes and be able to correct errors more effectively. A colour-coded heatmap should allow artists to identify the proverbial bottleneck in the node graph more quickly.

Solo Materials to Preview Parts of Your LookDev | Katana 6.0 Tutorial

Katana 6.0 | Preview Your Work With Material Soloing

• Material Solo tab (Material Solo tab): This provides a preview of the look development, allowing artists to better understand how set nodes will affect the final result. An immediate insight into the components of the material setup is provided. In other words, material networks – even complex ones – can be quickly isolated and debugged. Each individual section can be viewed as a preview.

Share and Reuse Work with LiveShadingGroups | Katana 6.0 Tutorial

• So-called LiveShadingGroups are intended to further enhance look development. LiveShadingGroups give artists the opportunity to share projects and assets with each other. This works in that LiveShadingGroups, once set across scenes, automatically update scenes linked to them – as soon as participating artists make changes.

Katana 6.0 | Quality of Life Improvements for LookDev Artists

• The NetworkMaterialEdit material interface allows artists to customise the material interface within the NetworkMaterialEdit node – thus “breaking away from linear workflows”, as the press release states.

Click further: Full details of the new functions can be found at campaigns.foundry.com/products/katana/whats-new . Digital Production reported on the release of the previous version, Katana 5.0 , on 27 December 2021 – at the time, we highlighted compatibility with Nuke, various rendering upgrades and the Universal Scene Description as the most impressive features.

The post The Foundry releases Katana 6.0! first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.