Visual effects software developer 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.
David Fowler, Head of Technology, Reliance MediaWorks UK shares, “KATANA is changing the lighting mindset. 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. Having always been a supporter of The Foundry, I’m delighted to be leading the KATANA charge in India and the UK.”
Tushar Kewlani, Head of CG, Reliance MediaWorks Mumbai says, “With our Global production model for VFX, having KATANA in our pipeline gives us a fantastic advantage going forwards. With work happening across facilities we are looking forward to the flexibility and efficiency KATANA will provide in our VFX production pipeline.”
Originally developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks, KATANA takes an innovative recipe based approach, enabling facilities large and small to build highly scalable and efficient lighting pipelines without a large internal engineering effort.
Artists can define and control look and lighting whilst 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.
KATANA 1.0 was released in October 2011 and is already in use in production at Industrial Light and Magic, Digital Domain and Sony Pictures ImageWorks. KATANA is also currently under evaluation at a number of studios of various sizes.