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Foundry’s Katana 3.0 to Include New Rendering Plugin 3Delight

Completely shareable between Katana and Maya, innovative shading engine is allows for direct transfer of look development between digital content creation apps.

Toonbox Entertainment leveraged Foundry’s Katana and 3Delight integration for its forthcoming animated feature ‘The Nut Job 2.’

LONDON -- Creative software developer Foundry has announced that the newly redesigned and Nodal Scene Interface (NSI) powered 3Delight will be available as a free plug-in for Katana 3.0 interactive renders when it ships later this year.

The collaboration is underpinned by Katana’s track record of solving the industry’s toughest look development and lighting problems. The exciting collaboration between Foundry and Illumination Research Pte Ltd will continue to drive efficiencies and help artists to deliver better, faster and more cost-effective animation and VFX work through improved workflows and technology.

“All of Toonbox Entertainment’s projects have been rendered with 3Delight and we have used both proprietary and third-party tools for look development and lighting, but developments at the Foundry, including the high level of integration between Katana and 3Delight have enabled us to bring to bear a whole new level of flexibility and power which we hope to leverage on all of our future projects,” John Carey, vice president of production and technology at Toonbox Entertainment, commented. “This will enable us to do better work faster while consuming fewer resources. Yes, it is faster, better AND cheaper and that is a pretty compelling combination.”

3Delight is powered by NSI - which is both nodal and hierarchical - allowing for fully interactive live rendering. 3Delight promises to refine look development and lighting tasks to enhance the artist experience. Unique workflows like the plug-in’s light mixer technology allows artists to render final quality images and adjust lighting interactively, while the edits are fed back directly to lights or groups of lights in Katana’s GafferThree lighting tools. The fully OSL-based shading engine is compatible with both Katana and Maya, allowing for the direct transfer of look development files between the DCC apps. The geometry based lighting frees an artist to execute compelling lighting with straightforward real world techniques.

Key benefits include:

  • Fast, physically based rendering technology with open shading language (OSL) at its core
  • Fully interactive live rendering and a real-time light mixer especially well-suited for Katana’s workflow
  • Material nodes that are 100 percent compatible with the Maya version
  • Ability to use fur/hair and displacements extensively with negligible impact on performance
  • Better quality rendering with perfectly smooth subdivision surfaces
  • Network caching for efficient network utilization by automatic scene dependency localization

“We are very excited to offer Katana 3.0 with 3Delight as an out-of-the-box rendering solution,” commented Jordan Thistlewood, senior product manager for look development and lighting at Foundry. “This provides new users with a “download and explore” experience and our existing users with a very powerful option for their pipelines. Multiverse, 3Delight and Katana combine to offer a complete Maya and Katana pipeline solution. Working with the 3Delight team has been great and we are really impressed how far they have stretched the interactive look development, lighting and rendering experience in Katana.”

 “After two years of development of the NSI architecture, we are excited to bring 3Delight to Katana built entirely on that new state-of-the-art interface/technology,” Aghiles Kheffache, chief technical officer for Illumination Research, said. “It makes the entire process of scene editing and manipulation fun and efficient, thanks to across the board live rendering.”

3Delight will be available as a free plug-in for Katana 3.0, at no additional cost for new or existing users for interactive renders. Katana 3.0 with 3Delight will be showcased at SIGGRAPH 2017 as part of a public beta. Combined Katana/3Delight render licenses for production rendering will be available for purchase, with pricing to be announced at a later date.

Source: Foundry

Jennifer Wolfe's picture

Formerly Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network, Jennifer Wolfe has worked in the Media & Entertainment industry as a writer and PR professional since 2003.