The Foundry have acquired the technology of Sony Pictures Imagework’s (SPI) Katana 3D lighting & compositing package. Katana’s hardcore lighting node based technology will be integrated into an upcoming version of the Foundry’s Nuke 2D package. We spoke to both companies about why SPI would part with such a great in house tool and why the Foundry needs another compositing lighting system, in this online exclusive.

Source: Foundry Acquires Katana from SPI for Nuke.

• Katana Application

* Python application

* Lighting, rendering, and image compositing

* Facility funnel from data to images

* Team of six developers for 3 years

* Passed 300,000 lines of code

  * 190,000 C/C++

    * 45% image operations

    * 20% scene processing

    * 20% plugins to external apps

  * 120,000 Python

    * 75% interface and pyqt widgets

* Current Projects

  * [Spiderman 3](http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/spiderman3/)

  * [Surf’s Up](http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/surfsup/)

  * [Beowolf](http://www.beowulfmovie.com/)

* User Python Interfaces

  * expression evaluation as field values

  * interactive shell

  * macros as directories of .py files

  * pixel processing and scene processing

* Weekly release cycle

  * Development and maintenance

* Plugin extensions in Python

Source: Python at Imageworks .

Notes:

• 介紹這則新聞
• 介紹 Katana in Python
• 介紹 Nuke 原來的 3d lighting 功能
• 我的觀點：
  • 3d compositing by nuke chief scientist
  • comp-oriented lighting需要直接與 shader, lighting, rendering 做結合，才符合 pipeline 的精神。
  • python application: ui, extension, integration, …