The Foundry announced that Reliance MediaWorks has purchased a site license of Katana. The licenses will be utilized at Reliance MediaWorks’ UK and Mumbai facilities. Working across geographies in this way requires a robust, flexible VFX pipeline and Reliance MediaWorks looked to The Foundry’s NUKE and Katana to provide the key building blocks.
“Katana is changing the lighting mindset,” said David Fowler, head of technology, Reliance MediaWorks UK. “The industry is very excited and adopting Katana is definitely helping us attract the best lighting talent. They can’t wait to get their hands on it. Katana gives us an off-the-shelf solution that would otherwise take 12-18 months to write ourselves and would require continual support.”
Originally developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks, Katana takes an innovative recipe-based approach, enabling facilities to build highly scalable and efficient lighting pipelines without a large internal engineering effort.
Artists can define and control look and lighting while maintaining performance with very large datasets. Katana operates non-destructively using a rule-based approach that allows modeling, look development, animation and lighting teams to work in parallel.
“With our global production model for VFX, having Katana in our pipeline gives us a fantastic advantage going forwards,” explained Tushar Kewlani, head of CG, Reliance MediaWorks Mumbai. “With work happening across facilities, we are looking forward to the flexibility and efficiency Katana will provide in our VFX production pipeline.”
Katana 1.0 was released in October and is already in use in production at Industrial Light and Magic, Digital Domain and Sony Pictures ImageWorks.
