Improve your ROI
- • Work in parallel across multiple stages of production
- • Speed up production processes
- • Achieve more within a day’s work
- • Get the most out of your resources
What is Katana?
Fast and formidable, Katana is a look development and lighting powerhouse, tackling creative challenges with ferocity and ease. It arms artists with the creative freedom and scalability to exceed the needs of today’s most demanding CG-rendering projects.
Features
Studios
Power up your pipeline
Flexible USD-optimised tech, combined with numerous APIs, and multiple commercial renderers, make Katana the Swiss Army knife of your pipeline.
See all featuresPioneering rendering
Katana’s Foresight Rendering workflows, comprised of Multiple Simultaneous Renders and Networked Interactive Rendering, provide artists with scalable feedback for faster iterations.
See all featuresArtists
Artist-focused lighting
Light at the speed of thought thanks to cutting-edge Lighting Tools, empowering artists to light whole sequences of shots with Katana’s industry-leading, multi-shot workflows.
See all featuresCollaborative look development
Katana is made to drive the look development of hero or high-volume assets while seamlessly collaborating with shot production.
See all featuresKatana 8.0 — What's new
Katana 8.0 now comes with complete roundtripping — to and from USD — within the application. Combined with Katana’s production-proven framework, this roundtrip provides a fully supported fallback mechanism that enables you to migrate your teams to USD — in your own time and without risk!
What’s more, Katana 8.0’s USD exporting capabilities give you even more power, so that you can bring entire USD layers and stages back up the pipeline to share with other departments.
Benefits
Studios
World-class technology
- • Use Katana, Nuke, and Mari together for unmatched power
- • Unlock pioneering production rendering workflows
- • Enjoy seamless integration with multiple renderers, APIs, and USD
Artists
Hassle-free creativity
- • Implement art direction with precision
- • Make the right choices faster
- • Avoid layers of technical complexity
- • Solve problems faster and tackle the next challenge sooner
Perfect for teams
- • Share work seamlessly
- • Harmonize across departments
- • Safely integrate updates from downstream departments
- • Make and share tools that solve group problems
Wētā FX
“Katana has streamlined our lighting pipeline, freeing up our artists to focus more fully on their craft.”
Exclusively available to new customers requiring up to 10 interactive seats
Minimum 3 year term
Subscribe
$2,499/yr*
- Interactive artist session license
- 3Delight interactive rendering included. Other renderers require their own license
- Access to technical support
Subscribe
$209/yr*
- Unlock Katana’s Foresight Rendering power
- Allows the use of Katana in batch, shell, and script mode
- Required for command-line rendering with any renderer plugin
Katana and Mari: the ultimate look development software duo
Interoperability between Katana and Foundry’s 3D texture painting tool Mari is a huge part of Katana’s past and future development plans to streamline look development workflows everywhere.
Mari is built for today’s most complex creative challenges. It ships with the Arnold Standard Surface, V-ray, and 3Delight render engines, plus RenderMan for Mari. Using these, artists can paint textures in Mari with a higher degree of confidence that their art will look correct in the final render. This reduces feedback loops between Mari and Katana and offers a smoother look development process.
Who’s using Katana
Shaping the lighting artists of the future
Discover how UTS Animal Logic Academy is inspiring future artists, and giving them everything they need to succeed in their dream roles in the VFX industry.
Read now
Why Rodeo FX adopted Katana into their pipeline
Rodeo FX call Katana the best software for lighting on the market—here’s why.
Watch nowFAQ
How long does it take the average user to get used to Katana?
Where can I find Katana tutorials?
How long does it take to get Katana set up in my pipeline?
Where can I find case studies about studios like mine using Katana?
What training resources and opportunities are there for studios and artists getting set up with Katana?
How many Renders do I need per GUI?
What is the licensing model?
Experience Katana
Get first-hand insight into how exactly Katana can fit into your pipeline.
Discover the creative capabilities of Katana with a free 30-day trial.