Katana releases.

10 different modes of operation allow snapping focused on geometric vertices, edges, faces, surfaces, objects, lights and cameras. Options include placement with orientation informed by normals where appropriate. Using the axis handles of the transform tools allows snapping aligned based on a single axis.

Artists know exactly what they’re snapping to thanks to intuitive visual clues including automatic wireframes displayed over shaded models, outlines around objects, and face and edge highlighting. Coupled with the cursor hit area display, artists know precisely what objects are being considered.

With geometric preprocessing and caching based on the target area, even complex models should perform smoothly as objects or lights are moved across their surface.

Nodes that were already part of a network material can have their parameters adjusted. These nodes are given a yellow footer to highlight this edited state. Compared to unadjusted nodes with their dimmed display, edited nodes are clearly visible.

With the Network Material Edit, artists can add new, remove or replace existing individual nodes. The workflow extends to modifications to whole parts of a shading network. Added nodes are given a green footer which makes them stand out from edited or unadjusted nodes.

Katana 3.6 features a key update to its UI with a new modular system, providing the ability to use Dockable areas on the top, bottom, left and right of the UI. Any normal tab can be persistently locked to the edge of the UI. Tabs positioned in these dockable areas are saved as part user defined layouts for repeat usage.

Oftentimes the best workflow for a task will be to take part of Katana’s UI full screen. Yet you may need access to other key tabs at the same time to facilitate your work. Users can now create very powerful workflows whereby important UI tabs—like the Parameters Tab—are available when the Viewer Tab or Node Graph Tab are full screen, keeping the ‘must haves’ from the rest of the application within easy reach. Using the dockable areas, these optimized workflows are now just a “spacebar” click away.

3Delight NSI was built around the principle that live rendering should respond to changes of any part of the scene. Now the renderer that was the first to bring that level of interactivity to Katana sees a major update to the live render experience. Powered by new algorithms tuned for faster and smoother refinement, look development and lighting artists will surely appreciate the improvements to their workflow.

3D animations rendered with a 2D aesthetic are more popular than ever with the increased demand for animation content. 3Delight NSI 2.0 introduces a new toon shading workflow built on top of the production-proven technology of the previous generation of 3Delight. The toon shading tools leverage all the benefits of Katana’s procedural look development and sequence based lighting workflows. Flexible options for control over lines and shading, a refined set of AOVs for the massaging of 2D aesthetics in Nuke, and facilities for blending PBR shading with toon shading for more complex looks allow for plenty of aesthetic options.

Basic 3Delight NSI Toon Shading

3Delight NSI 2.0 introduces three very powerful tools for texture-driven look development: , dlTriplanar, dlTexture, and dlUV. With incredibly powerful procedural tile removal and height based blending, file textures have never looked so good using a triplanar projection. The dlTexture node has the tile removal functionality and includes powerful features like the normalisation of texture values to aid in the usage of texture map libraries in standardised material networks. The dlUV node combines common 2D placement operations with control over UVsets and other powerful functions supporting the dlTriplanar and dlTexture nodes.

Height blending effect of dlTriplanar node

Tile removal effect of dlTexture and dlTriplanar nodes

To further support robust compositing workflows and new tools like the toon shading, 3Delight NSI 2.0 now includes options for user defined AOVs, specialized toon shading AOVs, and a new Motion Vector AOV that is directly compatible with Nuke’s Vector Blur nodes.

3Delight AOV Selector with new options

Network Material Create and Network Material Edit tools now enjoy Supertools node support in Katana 3.6. Clients and vendors can edit the available whitelist of tools, with the added ability for custom shading Supertools to be drawn using the same technology as Foundry’s shading nodes. This enables the creation of specialised and complex custom tools for shading, making Network Material Workflows an even more formidable facet of Katana’s toolset. The toon shading workflow of 3Delight NSI 2.0 which ships with Katana 3.6 is an example of the power of this workflow.

3Delight AOV Group Supertool in a Network Material Create node

Artists working in Katana 3.6 no longer have to choose between power and speed for the majority of expression-based usage in the Katana node graph. A newly-introduced ‘string concatenation’ ability has been added to Katana’s Reference Expressions which is powered by C++. This allows users to join multiple blocks of information into one “string”, improving the functionality of this expression language, and meaning that users no longer need to rely on the Python-based expression language when seeking flexibility in complex setups.

New string concatenation syntax for Reference Expressions

Katana 3.6’s newly introduced OpWrite Node allows programmers, pipeline developers and C++ savvy TDs to quickly build custom “op” tools from within Katana—a previously time-consuming process that normally occurs outside of the DCC, involving multiple cycles of coding, compiling, loading and testing. Developed internally at Foundry to support Katana development, this great tool is now being shared with everyone.

Katana’s OpWrite node