Katana – Mastering Lookdev And Lighting For The Vfx Industry

What you’ll learn

• Be able to fully control and understand Katana to help you get started in the industry
• Gain important software requirement skills in Katana for job applications
• Hands-on information and workflows from experienced artist
• Creating tools to help you become more efficient as an artist in the industry
• Develop Macros, OpScripts and other helper tools
• Becoming a versatile artist and land a job in the industry
• Fulfill the additional application requirement to be proficient in katana.

Requirements

• A technical understanding is needed to fulfill this course requirements
• Recommended to know Arnold renderer
• Problem solving skills and logical thinking
• Eager to learn new techniques and workflows
• Working with node based editors is a plus

Description

Arvid Schneider is an established artist, who has been working in the professional VFX industry for more than 10 years. He has worked on big blockbusters like Captain Marvel, Aquaman, Ready Player One, Jurassic World, Transformers and many more.

With his knowledge and expertise, Arvid has prepared a detailed course to get to know and understand the industry standard lighting and look development software Katana. This course will help you to jump-start your career by becoming an advanced lighting and shading TD in today’s competitive industry.

Disclaimer

• This course is tagged for all levels – but it gets Intermediate and Advanced fairly quickly! 
• This is a technical and artistic course which means that it will contain quite a lot of theory, bit also artistic hands-on lectures.
• This course is using Katana for Windows and Arnold as the main software tools. (But all topics can be achieved on Linux or Mac workstations, the same applies for other renderers).

Mastering Katana

• Gain real production insights
• Fully understand how to work within Katana and to understand important workflows
• Create your own powerful macros and templates to organize your work
• Technical course on how to create advanced templates within Katana
• Advanced LookDev and Lighting practices
• Opscripts, Graph State Variables, Reference Expressions, Macros, Live Groups, Variable Switches

Brief Overview

1. Introduction to Katana – installation, navigation, UI
2. Principles of Look Development and Lighting
3. Creating advanced and versatile Look and Lighting templates
4. Look development of production assets
5. Shot lighting of production assets
6. Rendering shots
7. Compositing

Accomplishments

• You will be able to fully work with Katana at a high level.
• Directly jump into a VFX company with advanced knowledge in templates and workflows.
• Create and customize custom workflows.
• Develop tools and macros.

What this course is NOT

• Not teaching a specific renderer (Course is applicable to other renderers).
• Not about modelling, texturing or animation.
• Will not teach about Python or Lua or other programming languages.

• Students who want to work professionally in the VFX industry and need a good understanding of the software Katana
• Beginner level artists curious to learn VFX standards
• Artists who want to add another set of tools to their toolbag