I suppose you probably know this by know, because the news was all over the vfx-sites. But for the sake of completeness of the major vfx-bizz happenings (and of course to get the more or less regular posts going) I mention this again…
Not long ago Imageworks was in the news because of they released a couple of their in-house developments as open-source (very generously from them imho) and now they´re again with a big unexpected deal with the Foundry. The development of Katana, SPIs proprietary lighting and compositing application is handed over to the company behind Nuke. The arrangement goes along with a Nuke side-license for SPI (after ILM and Weta Digital were also adopting Nuke with a side-license). Reportedly they are also interested in seeing Katana tightly integrated into the Nuke toolkit (which shouldn’t be too complicated because both programs share a similar architecture.)
In my eyes this is a huge step forward for the Foundry in terms of relighting-technology. Hopefully it turns out to be the link between 2D and 3D we all wanted. The first integrated features of Katana should be incorporated into Nuke as soon as Siggraph 2010…
Btw: it´ll be very interesting how Eyeon will compensate this shortcut in development time from the Foundry.
2 links to check out:
- a very in-depth article about the topic over at fxguide (with images)
- the vfxtalk thread (with some inside from actual SPI compositors)