The Foundry releases KATANA 1.0

London – Visual effects software developer The Foundry has announced the release of KATANA 1.0, a look development and lighting tool, replacing the conventional CG pipeline with a flexible recipe based asset workflow. In tandem with this release, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), a Lucasfilm Company, has purchased a site license of KATANA.

Currently in use for upcoming productions, ILM made this significant investment to boost their production pipeline across their ILM and Lucasfilm companies. As a KATANA site license holder ILM will deploy the software both in their San Francisco and Singapore studios.

KATANA is specifically designed to address the needs of a highly scalable asset based workflow to; allow updating of assets once shots are already in progress; share lighting set-ups, such as edits and overrides, between shots and sequences; allow use of multiple renderers and specifying dependencies between render passes; and allow shot specific modification of assets to become part of the lighting 'recipe' for shots.