Is

clogging your pipeline?

Imagine you had to create an entire animated band – all covered in fur – with a small team, on a tight budget, and with limited time to implement a new system. That’s exactly what Brazen Animation was able to do in just one month for the The Meeps project, thanks to Katana.

Find out how Katana helped Brazen Animation’s Technical Look Development Leads Ethan Crossno and Jessica Hogan bring the furry supergroup to life — and how they coped with animating all that fur…

Load projects faster

Down with data-heavy scenes?

The challenge

Before adopting Katana, Brazen Animation found that working on data-heavy scenes was incredibly slow. The technical complexity involved meant longer time frames, resulting in more money spent.

De-furred loading

How Katana solved it

“The Meeps had a lot of characters with fur and some of the environments were rather large,” says Ethan Crossno. “The deferred loading capability of Katana and its support for USD made it so that we could open scenes quickly and work fast, even with heavy assets.”

Quickly load up scenes

How Katana solved it

Deferred loading helps you to optimise your workflow and only load the assets you need. This means that you can quickly load up a scene with large sets of geometry in Katana, which would otherwise be slow to open.

Boost consistency & collaboration

The challenge

The Meeps project involved more than 90 shots, which were further complicated by the need to animate a large amount of complex fur for each character. What’s more, the studio had a relatively small team working on the production, so consistency and the ability to collaborate were vital.

4 ways

solved it

Work on multishot level

“The number one reason we made the switch was Katana's ability to let us work on a sequence or multi-shot level,” explains Jessica Hogan. “Both Katana and Nuke's LiveGroups afforded us the ability to push changes out to everyone on our team with minimal negative impact.”

Make global changes with ease

“If a global change was requested, rather than going through the arduous process of asking each artist to manually apply the same changes, we were able to easily make a change to a given light rig or setting in its LiveGroup, then push that out to all the shots at once,” says Jessica.

Render multiple shots at once

“Each shot artist was given ‘chunks’ of similar shots to work on at once,” says Jessica. “Thanks to Katana, they were able to build one file for all of their shots and, in one convenient location, make adjustments, set up their render layer and ultimately render multiple shots at once. The time saving there was enormous.”

Share complex setups at sequence level

“Katana made our lighting process really flexible and easy to share…Sharing complex setups was almost as simple as copying and pasting,” adds Ethan Crossno. “Having most of the complex settings handled at a sequence level meant that artists could spend more time focusing on their lighting, and less time debugging render issues.”

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Implement Katana in just one month

The challenge

Brazen Animation needed to implement a new system quickly in order to hit the studio’s deadline. Only by getting the team up and running in Katana as quickly as possible were they able to get the benefit of its features.

How

solved it

Foundry provided weekly support and was on hand to assist Brazen Animation with any queries while the studio implemented Katana.

“We had a little over a month to integrate Katana into our pipeline and I don't think we could have done it without [Foundry’s] help,” says Ethan.

Talk to your sales rep about Katana

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