Artist-focused look development UX.
Katana ships with the industry's most powerful look development architecture and UX. Presented to the artist via a set of tools using an elegant shading node UI, Katana allows an artist to create incredible look development on a single complex asset or hundreds of variations, all supported by an architecture and workflow that allows look development to continue in parallel to shot production. This ships alongside tools for creating procedural shot based fixes or tweaks with complete transparency for everyone in production. Combined with Katana’s ability to drive look development by production meta-data, automation and artists pair perfectly to reach new heights of look development—both in terms of quality and efficiency.
Manage complex material setups
The Network Material Create node was built to create and manage multiple materials inside of one NMC node. Each material can have networks for any active renderer plugin plus USD Preview Surface materials. Artists interact with an elegant set of nodes built as part of a node graph system designed to perform efficiently with even the most complex shading networks. The workflows provided by these great artist facing tools are compatible with the most complex pipeline workflows offered in Katana.
Easy procedural edits
Katana’s Network Material Edit node provides look development and lighting artists with the ability to make procedural edits to network materials that already exist. Whether it be altering a material from a material library so it’s exactly what the artist needs, or making procedural shot edits to approved art direction, Katana has you covered. No matter how complex the network, the UI of the Network Material Edit node ensures artists see the full network, any existing edits, and their current edits, with each criteria being filterable in an easy-to-use UI. This includes materials designed in other packages and imported by USD.
Your hub for USD based look development
Katana ships with a native USD/Hydra plugin that allows Katana to author, consume and edit USD Preview Surface information for surface materials. Displayed in full glory in the HdStorm-powered Hydra viewer, Katana is your hub for creating and sharing what your assets will look like in both your viewport and final render. Overlay this rich USD Preview Surface with the Monitor layer as you finish your final render art direction to ensure Preview Surface and final renders match as close as possible, then export USD Shade files for any directly supported, actively loaded Hydra render delegates of Katana renderer plugins.
