Katana 3.0 to Ship with Rendering Tool 3Delight

The collaboration between Foundry and Illumination Research Pte Ltd is designed to help artists to deliver animation and VFX work through improved workflows and technology, the companies report.

3Delight is powered by NSI, which is nodal and hierarchical, allowing for fully interactive live rendering. 3Delight is built to refine look development and lighting tasks to enhance the artist experience, the company reports. Workflows like the plug-in’s light mixer technology allow artists to render final quality images and adjust lighting interactively, while the edits are fed back directly to lights or groups of lights in Katana’s GafferThree lighting tools. The fully OSL-based shading engine is compatible with both Katana and Maya, allowing for the direct transfer of look development files between the DCC apps.

Key benefits include physically based rendering technology with open shading language (OSL) at its core; fully interactive live rendering and a real-time light mixer well-suited for Katana's workflow; material nodes that are 100% compatible with the Maya version; ability to use fur/hair and displacements extensively with negligible impact on performance; quality rendering with perfectly smooth subdivision surfaces; and network caching for efficient network use by automatic scene dependency localization.

3Delight will be available as a free plug-in for Katana 3.0, at no additional cost for new or existing users for interactive renders.

For more info, visit Foundry and Illumination Research.

Sources: Press materials received from the company.