Foundry's Product Manager for Lighting Gary Jones has told us about the upcoming Katana 5.0's features, talked about Katana-Nuke interoperability, and discussed the Foresight+ rendering feature.
I am Gary Jones, the Product Manager for Lighting at Foundry. I cross-trained to VFX in 2008 at Escape Studios in London. I got my first job in this industry at Foundry over 10 years ago to write the initial User Guide and Reference Guide for Katana.
After working at Foundry for a couple of years, I went out into the industry, initially as a Maya Generalist but then as a Lighting Artist at MPC. I worked on Jungle Book, Passengers, Ghostbusters, Transformers: The Last Knight, Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar's Revenge, and The Lion King.
Partway through The Lion King, I decided to take a break from production and returned to Foundry, initially as a Product Specialist but later moving into the Product Management arena. My responsibilities mostly revolve around helping the engineering team understand the customers’ needs and pointing them in the right direction of what we should be building into the product and what workflows we should be supporting.
We use several communication techniques with clients, and we are always looking to improve this process. Part of my job is juggling the immediate needs of the existing customers, anticipating their future requirements, tying it in with a wider Foundry-based and industry-wide roadmap, and making sure that the product is also appealing to new customers. Finding this balance can actually be different for every release.
Katana 5.0 has a number of different improvement streams. The main one is our updated rendering feature called Foresight+, but here are some of the others:
Render Delegates with Arnold:
In Katana 4.0, we developed a system called Foresight. This gave artists two things – the ability to have multiple renders going at the same time while streaming the pixels into the interface and the ability to have those renders exist on your local machine or remotely on your network or farm. This combines very well with one of Katana’s core strengths - having an entire sequence (or possibly even a show) in one project. This was a nice addition in Katana 4.0 but it always had a limit, as it only really worked well with Preview renders.
What we’ve done with Foresight+ is to re-write our Live rendering system and the infrastructure that Foresight is built on. Now an artist can work on lots of shots simultaneously and see the changes they are making update across all the shots where it applies. Imagine having 20 shots on your plate and having the ability to raise the quality of those shots simultaneously. A very powerful and exciting new addition.
Before the lockdown, we’d visit learning institutions and explain the benefits of our software in person. If students were interested in working at the highest level of lighting, then we shared that Katana was the software to learn, having been the lighting tool used by the teams working on all the VFX Oscar-nominated films.
We are fortunate enough to have several people who have developed courses for the software and the tutorials on our Foundry Learn platform to help new users understand the principles of the software. It is a challenge, though, as Katana’s true strength is working across a number of shots in a sequence at the same time, and this involves a lot of work already being finished in other software. If you put in the time to learn it, though, it’ll really help you stand out as the studios who already have Katana are almost always looking for artists, especially in this boom in content that we are all seeing due to competing streaming platforms. There’s never been a better time to learn any 3D software, and adding Katana to your arsenal will give you a massive step-up if your goal is to work on the most exciting content, whether in VFX or Animation.
We aim to get Katana out in December, and if you’d like to be notified, we have a sign-up page where you can register your interest!