Katana 2

KATANA 2 offers significantly increased performance when working with renderers that support multi-threaded geometry creation, including RenderMan® and Arnold. Previously the KATANA procedural could only be run on a single thread, taking longer to return rendered pixels and so reducing the ability to iterate quickly.

Increase efficiency and reduce the need for project segmentation with this new concept. Graph State Variables let you set nodes to change their behaviour based on the context in which the scene is being evaluated at any given time, such as which shot within a sequence, or which pass within a shot is being rendered.

Much more powerful, more flexible and easier to use than the previous methods, Ops is a new public API that lets you write plug-ins to create and modify scene data. With access to even advanced functionality such as generating geometry on the fly, we used Ops ourselves to rewrite the core of every node in KATANA.

Manipulate data from within the KATANA UI with the new Lua-based OpScript node that offers higher performance than the previous Python-based script node and supports multi-threading. With access to the complete new Op C++ API, OpScript lets you perform even complex operations that manipulate the scene graph hierarchy.

Live Rendering is now faster, more stable and easier to use for a better overall user experience for both lighting and look development. You can restrict updates to specific parts of the scene graph for better interactivity; this, along with Interactive Render Filters, can be modified in the middle of a Live Render.

A new event-driven public API for accessing scene graph data works with the new core engine’s asynchronous processing, and makes writing UI code simpler. With it, you can create ‘clients’ that can ask for and receive events when scene graph data is ready, or observe a location and receive an event when data changes.

Working with large numbers of lights is now faster and easier. A new, more efficient GafferThree SuperTool lets you edit existing lights as well as creating new ones, so lights can be defined at the sequence level and modified on a per-shot basis. Custom packages can specify which light types can be created and edited.