Advanced Look Development Workflows.
Beyond the basics of creating material networks, Katana has several tools and workflows that make it a look development powerhouse for artists, teams and pipelines. From tools that allow senior artists to make look development building blocks that drive consistency of art direction to tools that allow a single artist to deliver more than anyone could expect, Katana is a program that will expand your look development potential for years to come.
Multitasking of look development
Material nodes can store parameters for the surface, displacement or light shaders for multiple renderer plugins at the same time. Drive both the look of your viewport and final render with a single assignment. Read attributes from geometry to drive materials with pipeline data, allowing you to create a small set of materials that drive a large variety of looks.
Complexity tamed and shared
Construct Network Materials using a combination of texture maps and renderer procedural nodes in an artist-focused UI. Share nodes between multiple shading networks, and sort and organize complex hierarchies of materials. Create complex networks with curated controls, exposed for artists to adjust without the fear of inconsistent art direction.
Powerful hierarchical procedural workflows
Katana can create shaders using an existing one as a template, called parent and child materials. All the promoted controls of the parent can be adjusted as procedural overrides on the child material. At the same time, changes made to the parent that cannot be overridden or are not overridden will flow through to the child shader. The Network Material Edit node can be used to make procedural changes to the internals of a child material as well. Variations of assets have never been so easy to look develop as when using Katana’s parent and child material toolset.
Make look development modular
Katana’s shading node system has a specialised node called the Shading Group. This is a user defined shading node that is a collection of other shading nodes. Nodes inside the Shading Group can have their inputs and outputs promoted to the surface of the Shading Group where they are shown as custom port connections and with applicable parameters in the parameter interface. Complex shading networks can be simplified, and blocks of shading nodes that need to be reused can form shading widgets.
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