Katana 3.0v9 Release Notes

Release Date

15 March 2019

Previous Releases

• Katana 3.0v8 Release Notes

System Requirements

Officially Supported Operating Systems

  • Windows 7 64-bit or higher
  • Linux 64-bit operating system (CentOS/RHEL 6)

Hardware Requirements

Minimum Recommended
CPU Dual-core processor
Storage 1+ GB available for installation
System RAM 1+ GB available
Graphics RAM 1+ GB available 2+ GB available
Display 800 x 600 1920 x 1080
OpenGL OpenGL 4.3+

'Recommended' does not guarantee that it meets your particular needs

Tested Workstation Hardware

The configurations listed below are those that Foundry have tested with Katana. Due to the constantly changing nature and wide variety of computer hardware available in the market, Foundry is unable to officially certify hardware. The list below can be used as a recommendation and does not guarantee that it meets your particular needs.

  • NVIDIA Quadro M4000

  • NVIDIA Quadro P4000

  • NVIDIA Quadro K4000

  • NVIDIA Quadro K6000

Please download and install the latest graphics driver from the NVIDIA website.

If you encounter any issues, please contact Customer Support directly through the Support Portal at the following address: https://support.foundry.com.

What's New in Katana 3.0

These release notes describe changes from Katana 3.0v8 to 3.0v9.

For an overview of all changes in the Katana 3.0 line, please see What's New in Katana 3.0.

Bug Fixes

  • TP 384501 - When changing transform parameters on a PrimitiveCreate node whose type parameter is set to coordinate system plane, the resulting location's xform attributes did not change accordingly. (This issue was a regression in Katana 3.0v8.)

  • TP 384389 - When a Viewer (Hydra) tab was created in the background as part of a Katana layout of panes, and no other OpenGL-based tab was created, when switching to that Viewer (Hydra) tab, Katana crashed due to a bug in Qt 4's OpenGL library.

  • TP 383997 - When using a Rename node to rename child locations under a given rootLocation, and the entered pattern matched the names of child locations that are deleted, e.g. by Prune nodes upstream, those child locations could wrongly come back to life with different names, or child locations were not renamed correctly. (This issue was a regression in Katana 2.0v1.)

  • TP 383973 - When closing a Viewer (Hydra) tab that has always been in the background, Katana crashed due to use of GL functions in Viewport_isGLContextCurrent() while GLEW was not initialized. These crashes often occurred during application shutdown.

  • TP 381824 - When removing a layer from a viewport in a ViewerAPI-based viewer tab in the UI, the ViewportLayer::cleanup() function of the respective layer was not called.

  • TP 379198 - The performance of Foundry::Katana::Util::Path::IsRelativePath() and Foundry::Katana::Util::Path::RelativeToAbsPath(), which is used by FnGeolibCookInterfaceUtils::matchesCEL(), was improved, primarily by reducing the number of std::string allocations.

Known Issues

Live Groups

  • TP 85118 / BZ 41152 - When editing parameters of a node that is part of a LiveGroup node and reloading the parent LiveGroup node, the UI state of the Parameters tab is reset. This includes scroll bar positions, selections of items, and selections of nested tabs (for example Object, Material and Linking tabs for a Gaffer node).

  • TP 84998 / BZ 41092 - When reloading a LiveGroup node's parameter interface and contents from its source, parameters of child nodes that are edited in floating panes disappear from those panes.

  • TP 84020 / BZ 40598 - Reverting a LiveGroup node does not revert its user parameters.

  • TP 84019 / BZ 40599 - Parameters that are added to LiveGroup nodes are wrongly discarded when performing a reload from source, leading to loss of data.

  • TP 84018 / BZ 40600 - Undoing a revert of an unpublished LiveGroup node does not restore the LiveGroup's editable and modified state.

  • TP 83061 / BZ 40237 - Nodes can be dragged into the Group bubble of a non-editable LiveGroup node.

Materials

  • TP 269449 - Choosing Edit Shader Parameters from the main wrench menu of Material nodes does not show wrench buttons next to shader parameters. This can be worked around by toggling the edit flag on the node.

  • TP 199304 - The namespace parameter on Material nodes wrongly allows the insertion of Unicode codepoints outside the ASCII range.

  • TP 191052 - Katana does not have any support for the texture reference object workflows of V-Ray for Maya.

Node Graph

  • TP 382639 - The Fit Backdrop Node to Selected Nodes command in the Edit menu of the Node Graph tab has not been updated to work in the new NetworkMaterialGroup context.

Parameter Expressions

  • TP 188533 - Expressions linked to non-local parameters on not previously edited Material nodes can't be evaluated.

  • TP 105434 / BZ 47520 - Reference Expressions may not refer to dynamic parameters such as shader parameters.

  • TP 60457 / BZ 31790 - Setting an array or group parameter to an expression results in an invalid expression. Upon setting a valid expression (for example, an evaluation of an equivalent parameter on another node using getParam), the parameter is not immediately updated. To workaround this issue, close and reopen the parameter, or flush caches while the node is not edited.

Rendering

  • TP 344118 - (Windows only) When installing Katana and opting to install the bundled version of 3Delight, the installation of 3Delight is made by modifying system-wide environment variables such as KATANA_RESOURCES. Thereafter, launching any version of Katana will pick up this installation of 3Delight, which may be incompatible with the version of Katana being launched.

    Note:  This does not affect Linux, where a bundled 3Delight installation is tied to its corresponding Katana installation.

  • TP 208802 - Closing the Histogram tab after use leaves the Monitor tab unable to display rendered images.

  • TP 176598 - Use of nodes that modify Graph State Variables in Interactive Render Filters is not currently supported.

  • TP 114182 / BZ 49288 - When exporting a Catalog item you need to specify the export folder path to an existing folder. If the folder you're trying to export to does not exist on disk Katana will fail to export.

  • TP 94052 / BZ 44199 - The Repeat Previous Render menu command only works on renders started from a 3D node's context menu.

  • TP 74799 / BZ 36926 - The rendererSettings > displayOptions parameter of a RenderOutputDefine node for the PRMan renderer, shown when its type parameter is set to 'raw', cannot be set using the Parameters tab.

  • TP 12517 / BZ 16168 - Only one Monitor tab may display the results of a Preview Render. The use of multiple Monitor tabs is not currently supported.

Widgets

  • TP 373702 - Clicking in the Viewport and pressing a shortcut whilst the mouse is hovered in another widget will still send the event back to the 'focused' Viewport widget, for shortcuts where the widget hovered over does not handle the shortcut.

  • TP 123558 / BZ 50911 - When changing an array parameter's tuple count/size, any corresponding attributes are not properly updated in the Attributes tab.

  • TP 65347 / BZ 34949 - Using Compiz can lead to text fields not receiving focus events correctly due to an incompatibility between Compiz and Qt. Depending on your configuration, disabling Compiz "desktop effects" may resolve the problem.

Miscellaneous

  • TP 383544 - When attempting to render an example project that uses .tx texture files with 3Delight for Katana 1.1 or later, if Katana is installed to a directory that the current user does not have write permissions for, 3Delight will fail to convert the .tx files to .tdl files in the same folder.

  • TP 381503 - The 3Delight Shading Nodes layered menu that's available in Katana environments with 3Delight for Katana loaded when pressing the S key with the pointer over a Node Graph tab does not currently support multiple Node Graph tabs: instead of placing created nodes in the Node Graph tab in which the layered menu was shown, the nodes may be created underneath the Group node that was entered in the largest available Node Graph tab.

  • TP 381284 - The 3Delight renderer plug-in makes use of source material locations rather than resolved material attributes as a means of de-duplication. This can result in material data being lost when excluding material locations from the Render Working Set during a Live Render session.

  • TP 337653 - Katana logs deprecation warnings when loading the PyMockAsset, PyMultiMockAsset and PyMockFileSeq shipping example Asset API plug-ins.

  • TP 218742 - (Windows only) Katana must be installed to a path no longer than ~140 characters. Attempting to install to a longer path results in an unintuitive error: "The system cannot find the path specified."

  • TP 112544 / BZ 49051 - The Viewer tab may lose sync with the Scene Graph tab when changes to expansion state are interrupted.

  • TP 107038 / BZ 47853 - Indication of attribute source nodes (such as the yellow 'glow' in the Node Graph tab) is unavailable as of Katana 2.0v1.

  • TP 84326 / BZ 40709 - The Alembic library does not support multiple process or thread access to an Alembic file. This means that a crash occurs when modifying an Alembic file outside Katana, while it's loaded in an open Katana scene. To avoid this, you must Flush Caches before attempting to update any modified Alembic files.

  • TP 80738 / BZ 39261 - Operations that lock and unlock nodes do not currently create entries in the Undo History, which can lead to an incorrect node graph state when undoing and redoing operations.

  • TP 71965 / BZ 36691 - State badges are currently shown for attribute values of dynamic array child parameters, even though only their parent array parameter should appear with a state badge.

  • TP 70217 / BZ 36176 - The 2D node Disk Render Upstream Render Outputs option does not use the batch render method, batchRender, for upstream render nodes, instead using diskRender.

  • TP 70196 / BZ 36170 - Control keys (notably arrow keys) do not function as expected in shell mode.