KATANA and RenderMan technical collaboration

The Foundry and Pixar Animation Studios have announced a strategic collaboration around KATANA and Pixars RenderMan. This co-development creates the best-of-breed in lighting and rendering.

The Foundry and Pixar Animation Studios have announced a concerted technical collaboration to bring KATANA and RenderMan together, creating a combined best-of-breed toolset for high-end lighting and rendering.

KATANA will now include a full RenderMan license as standard, along with free KATANA batch render licenses to help get the most out of any RenderMan pipeline, creating a compelling out-of-the box solution. The results of these efforts will be released to all customers inside future releases of KATANA.

KATANA, the premier lighting tool from The Foundry, and Pixar's RenderMan, which has long been recognized as the industry standard in visual effects and animation rendering, were both recently used together to great effect on Disney/Pixar's acclaimed short The Blue Umbrella, now playing in theatres with Monsters University. The successful outcome involved significant dedicated engineering effort from both parties, not only to better support RenderMan workflows, but to build new features into KATANA itself, based upon Pixar's own creative expertise and production-proven technology.

These continuing developments firmly cement KATANA and RenderMan together as the ultimate rendering and lighting collaboration, while being open and agnostic remains central to both solutions.

We are thrilled to be working with some of the world's most creative talent at Pixar as well as the RenderMan team. This development cements KATANA's already impressive pedigree for a piece of commercially available software - this really is the best of innovative lighting in production today.

Bill Collis, CEO at The Foundry

RenderMan represents the pinnacle of rendering technology and KATANA represents the state of the art in lighting. At Pixar we are proud of how we achieve excellence in look development and our collaboration sets a new standard for lighting and rendering that complements our extensive investment in RenderMan Studio for KATANA. Our end goal is to help create production-efficient software that is not only loved by artists, but also produces the amazing quality that Pixar's RenderMan is known for.

Chris Ford, RenderMan Business Director at Pixar

Details of the RenderMan offer Every KATANA customer will receive one RenderMan Pro Server license incorporated into the first ten KATANA interactive desktop licenses as part of the base package. Each of these KATANA interactive licenses will also come with ten free KATANA batch licenses to support any additional RenderMan renderers on the render-farm.

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Visit the KATANA product page

Visit the RenderMan product page on pixar.com

LINK:	http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/articles/2013/07/23/552/katana-and-renderm...
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