Katana 3.5 Released

Katana 3.5 brings a newly rebuilt core engine for users to quickly perform key operations and iterate faster. You can now render images directly to the viewer. Render agnostic USD plugin lets teams build powerful USD pipelines with less development effort. The team states that the source code will be open-sourced shortly after the release of Katana 3.5.

Highlights:

• The team has rewritten Katana’s core engine in collaboration with Intel, so the tool is 2-30x faster for many operations.

• The new Monitor Layer allows artists to interact with ray-traced renders directly in the viewer. Please note that that Katana's existing rendering system is 100% compatible with all existing renderer plugins. 

• Artists can now make customized shading groups with user-defined input and output connections. Shading Groups can now be whole materials or regularly utilized blocks of shading nodes, according to the team.

• Katana 3.5 brings integration with a Foundry-supported, renderer agnostic USD set of tools, so teams can now set up, experiment and build powerful USD production pipelines.

“Foundry and Intel collaborated to unleash impressive performance gains in the latest Katana 3.5 release. This is of real value for filmmakers, allowing them to finesse and render scenes at amazing speed,” said Roger Chandler, VP/GM of Visual Computing Software, Intel. 

You can learn more here.