This is wonderful news for fellow Compositors out there.

The Foundry has officially acquired Sony Pictures Imageworks’ in-house lighting/compositing system, Katana! Why is this so big? Well not only will Nuke in the very near future feature a complete 3D lighting package, completely bypassing traditional pipelines of 3D software lighting and giving control straight over to comp. But it’s also yet another sign that the VFX industry is moving towards…wait for it…STANDARDS!

Crazy I know, but this means more job opportunities for freelancers out there. And it also means that there might actually be a day when VFX Compositors doesn’t have to be in an expert in at least 3 seperate software packages all at once to survive. Which I for one, am GREATLY looking forward to.

LINK: Foundry Acquires Katana from SPI for Nuke

Sony Pictures Imageworks, (SPI) developed Katana as their primary internal 3d lighting and compositing package. SPI has been using it constantly since Spiderman 3 and on almost every picture since then. It is a very solid and comprehensive package “it is a pretty fully featured suite of tools that handles almost all the backend of our pipeline – everything after the animation is done and any processes are simulated- really Katana takes over from there” explained Rob Bredow CTO of SPI. “It gets everything ready for the renderer and then does all the compositing”.

On the lighting side the package, while not writing shaders, does allow nodal based manipulation of the shaders and speaks to third party renderers such as Pixar’s Renderman and Arnold. It started life as a 3D lighting package some five to six years ago, it takes assets (geometry) “assigns materials, textures, – gets the lighting rigs set up – it is the primary 3D lighting interface that all of our lighting people use” Bredow explains. The system is node based, like Nuke but covering lighting in addition to compositing.

Nuke’s taking over the world, and I can’t wait!