Artist-focused Lighting Tools.
Made up of several workflows modeled after the thought processes of trained cinematographers, Katana’s Lighting Tools overhaul the traditional digital lighting experience in a remarkable feat of UI and UX. These workflows empower artists to create, place and edit lights at the speed of thought—just as a cinematographer would live on-set.
The result: streamlined creative workflows in which artists and teams can directly respond to art direction requests, meaning less time for drudgery, and more time for creating something incredible.
Precise control
Work directly on top of the image during a live render session with gesture based controls. Katana’s renderer plugins draw rendered pixels on top of the rich GL pixel info from the Hydra Viewport. User interactions equally support a mouse or Wacom drawing tablet workflow.
Light at the speed of thought
Create and edit lights by interacting directly with the image and scene objects. Workflows support controlling lights based on where they illuminate or where the light itself must be located. Think the same way as a cinematographer in terms of practical light sources and those that support the scene in reference to those practicals. No longer does an artist have to use a trial and error process, adjusting numerical values or 3D transform handles that have not fundamentally changed in more than 20 years. Lighting choices are instead executed at the speed of thought for lightning-fast creativity.
Get closer to your creations
Work directly in Katana’s viewer with a simplified heads-up display to control light properties such as intensity, exposure and color. Users can customise which color and numerical controls are shown in the HUD. Enjoy a HUD on every light, and form a HUD spreadsheet through multiple selected or favorited lights. Use as much or as little on screen controls as you need as an artist to manage your simple or complex lighting scenarios directly from the viewer and experience power and freedom at your fingertips.
Gaffer Controls at your fingertips
Spend less time in the node graph and more time lighting: Katana 4's Lighting Tools allow you to do more of the common tasks directly in the viewer—like renaming, deleting, and adopting lights for editing. Each of these controls is available for any of the available Gaffer Three nodes in the active node graph which are controlled directly from the viewer as well. Manage your sequence-based lighting edits through multiple Gaffer Three nodes with direct access to your list of active Gaffer Three nodes right in the viewer.
Experience Katana
Get first-hand insight into how exactly Katana can fit into your pipeline.
Discover the creative capabilities of Katana with a free 30-day trial.