The Foundry said that Reliance MediaWorks is installing its Katana look-development and lighting alongside Nuke at its facilities in UK and Mumbai. Reliance becomes the fourth major customer for Katana, which The Foundry said is already in use at ILM and Digital Domain as well as SPI.
"Katana gives us an off-the-shelf solution that would otherwise take 12 to 18 months to write ourselves and would require continual support," said Reliance MediaWorks UK technology head David Fowler in a prepared statement.
Like The Foundry's Nuke, which was born in-house at Digital Domain, Katana was originally developed as a proprietary software tool and framework for Sony Pictures Imageworks (SPI). Early in 2010, The Foundry planned to incorporate Katana in Nuke, expanding its 3D lighting and rendering capabilties. The company has done that, but decided it also made sense as a separate product for a 3D VFX pipeline and released Katana 1.0 last October. It's designed as part of an easily scalable, largely off-the-sheld lighting pipeline that allows artists to work efficiently with large data sets.
Katana supports Pixar RenderMan and Arnold, but The Foundry describes it as "renderer-agnostic," meaning facilities can use a plug-in API to get it to work with their own rendering systems.
For more information: www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/katana
