Penchez-vous sur Katana de The Foundry, dont ILM a acheté une licence récemment. Un outil 2D/3D de compositing, lightning et rendering qui semble puissant. A suivre de prêt !
mardi 4 janvier 2011
KATANA - 3D scene assembly, lighting and look development
Par Guillaume le mardi 4 janvier 2011, 21:36
London, January 4th, 2011 – Leading visual effects software
developer, The Foundry (www.thefoundry.co.uk), today provided an
insight into its plans for KATANA.
KATANA is an environment for preparing 3D assets for
rendering. It allows artists to define and control
look and lighting whilst maintaining performance
with very large datasets. KATANA operates non-destructively using a rule-based
approach, allowing modeling, look development,
animation and lighting
teams to work in parallel.
Originally developed in house at Sony Pictures Imageworks to handle
increasingly complex workflows on productions such as Spider-Man and Superman
Returns, the commercial development of KATANA was taken on by The Foundry in November 2009 as part of a unique
collaboration between the two companies.
The Foundry's engineering effort, in consultation with a broad range of users,
is ensuring KATANA becomes a flexible product that can ultimately integrate
with any pipeline and any renderer in any facility.
These consultations have now developed into much more in-depth collaborations
with a number of key sites including MPC and Digital Domain who are now using KATANA in
alpha.
“Since Inception KATANA has been one of the
pillars of the production pipeline here at Imageworks and continues to prove
itself on such rigorous productions as G-Force, Watchmen, Alice in
Wonderland and animated features such as Monster House, Surf’s Up, Cloudy
With A Chance of Meatballs and The Smurfs."
“We are excited to see KATANA cutting its teeth outside the halls of Imageworks
and becoming available for artists and facilities everywhere. The Foundry
is a tremendous partner and by broadening the adoption of KATANA and product
support, a new generation of artists and productions can benefit from this
innovative production-proven technology.”
Rob Bredow, Chief Technology Officer, Sony
Pictures Imageworks
"Many brilliant technical innovations come out of production, but historically
those breakthroughs remain only within the production company. The
Foundry works with digital studios to make those innovations widespread, which
benefits the entire industry. I look for KATANA to have a similar impact
on the industry that Nuke has achieved."
Cliff Plumer, Chief Executive Officer,
Digital Domain.
"Like most large VFX studios, we maintain a complex
suite of proprietary software to enable us to render ever increasing
complexity, quantity and visual quality. We are excited about KATANA's
potential to offer a solid, flexible, off-the-shelf foundation that we can
build upon so that we can focus more of our efforts on what we do best, pushing
the boundaries of CG, trusting The Foundry to do what they do best, delivering
high quality, scalable software."
Davie Johnston, Director of Technology,
MPC
As the first commercial dedicated scene development tool, KATANA will enable
facilities large and small to build highly scalable lighting pipelines without
a large internal engineering effort.
KATANA is scheduled for commercial release in 2011.