Spin VFX Adopts The Foundry’s Katana

Press release from The Foundry:

London – Visual effects software developer The Foundry [1] announced that Spin VFX [2] has purchased a site license of KATANA and will now be using the software on all its future projects.

Spin VFX is the first mid-sized studio to purchase KATANA. The company has integrated The Foundry’s groundbreaking software, both during look development for asset creation, and then again as the lighting tool at the end of the pipe.

Colin Davies, VFX Supervisor at SPIN VFX comments: "We are excited to implement KATANA as it provides both the stability of a larger facility pipeline and a significant increase in efficiency for a medium company such as ourselves. KATANA is a major component that is facilitating our continued growth as a company. It's much more than just lighting software - it's an advanced pipeline tool that offers power and flexibility. We also use it to more easily handle large, complex scene files and most importantly, update our assets more efficiently. KATANA is an opportunity to adopt some of the best practices developed by dedicated R&D teams at leading visual effects studios.”

Originally developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks, KATANA takes an innovative recipe based approach, enabling facilities large and small to build highly scalable and efficient lighting pipelines without a large internal engineering effort.

Artists can define and control look and lighting whilst maintaining performance with very large datasets. KATANA operates non-destructively using a rule-based approach that allows modeling, look development, animation and lighting teams to work in parallel.

Andy Lomas, KATANA Product Manager at The Foundry comments: “More and more facilities are discovering the benefits of adopting KATANA in their pipelines. We are delighted to have Spin VFX on board. The adoption proves that KATANA is not exclusively for larger studios but has many benefits for growing houses.”

Spin VFX’s Colin Davies, VFX Supervisor continues: “KATANA makes our pipeline a far more advanced offering. We are now able to compete for a broader spectrum of work. It does this in a number of ways. Firstly, it gives us the ability to have a script based workflow which lets us scale well on projects with big shot counts and lots of similar set ups. Secondly, handling shots with large data sets becomes simpler. There is much less effort needed to break up files and update them on an on going basis, as KATANA only loads the data you need when you need it.”

KATANA 1.0 was released in October 2011 and is already in use in production at Industrial Light and Magic, Digital Domain and Sony Pictures ImageWorks. KATANA continues to be under evaluation at a number of studios, both large and small.