Katana 6.0 brings the following features and enhancements:

Material Soloing

Easily preview your work and get a better understanding of how every single node impacts the final result with Katana 6.0. The new Material Solo feature enables artists to gain instant visibility over components of their material setups, allowing them to quickly isolate and debug complex material networks. Forget about rewiring your setup and enjoy the functionality of previewing any section at any time so you can work more efficiently.

LiveShadingGroups

Katana 6.0 extends its look development toolset with the introduction of LiveShadingGroups. With Macros and User Parameters being introduced in Katana 4.5, this feature is another piece of the puzzle and enables users to share and reuse their work seamlessly between projects, assets or other artists. Any changes that are made to the original LiveShadingGroup will automatically be applied to any scenes that contain it, eliminating the need for a manual update when reopened. Start streamlining your workflow by reusing and recycling work.

Performance Tab

Debug your scenes more effectively with a new Performance tab, enabling you to keep track of the scale of your scenes—this can be the size of the Node Graph itself or time spent against various nodes. Introduced in Katana 6.0, this feature allows users to understand where bottlenecks may lie in the Node Graph with the help of a customizable color-coded Heat map that shows which nodes are taking the most time.

Quality of Life Improvements in the NetworkMaterialEdit

Building on the functionality originally introduced in Katana 4.5, the NetworkMaterialEdit Material Interface feature allows artists to easily modify and manage the material interface within the NetworkMaterialEdit node. Users are no longer restricted to working in a linear way and now have more freedom in modifying their setups downstream. The result? Modifications can be made without having the original material at hand, and there’s better flexibility whenever working with materials.

Want to try Katana for free for 30 days? Head over to the Katana product page to find out more!