Katana fastrack

The most comprehensive, artist-friendly Katana course available anywhere.

Introduction

Katana Fastrack is a complete Katana course covering every single aspect of the software, from an artist's point of view. We will be covering not only how to use the software but most importantly, professional workflows for look-development and lighting tasks.

The course is designed from a professional visual effects pipeline point of view, and consequently the explanations and tasks presented on this course are based on real-life experiences in the VFX industry, both working on film and television.

The goal of this course is to give you all the knowledge that you need if you are joining a visual effects facility that uses Katana in their pipeline, or if you just want to be ready when you get the call from any studio around the world working on big shows. The ideas and methodologies behind this course are widely used in many studios and they are based on my experience working on assets and shots for many years.

This course was part of my long format series on Patreon and now is available as a single purchase for everyone interested.

Content

This course covers a vast variety of topics and its total length is around to 15 hours.
Let’s take a look at some of the topics.

  • Where Katana fits in the pipeline

  • The most important concepts of Katana's workflow

  • How to prepare assets for Katana

  • The importance of look-dev recipes

  • How to create a very basic recipe

  • How to create master look files

  • How to use live groups to create light rigs

  • How to create a look-dev template for production

  • Expressions, macros and tools

  • Ant-Man look-development

  • Lighting pipeline

  • Shot lighting recipe

  • Lighting template

  • Ant-Man shot lighting 01

    • How to approach full cg shots in Katana

  • Ant-Man shot lighting 02

    • How to quickly capture HDRIs on-set and lighting references

    • How to technical grade footage and HDRIs to live under the same context

    • How to approach live action shots in Katana

  • Sequence / multi shot lighting techniques

What does this course include?

With this course you will get 15 hours of downloadable HD videos.
You will also get working files, like Katana scripts, slides, templates, Python scrips, etc. The Ant-Man asset is not available.
You will also get direct support with the author via email.

Software

Katana is the industry leader software for look-development and lighting for the visual effects and animation industry. Used by many studios around the world. We are going to be using different versions of Katana, finishing the course using Katana 3.5v2 As a render engine we’ll be using Arnold. Occasionally we will require Nuke to do slap comps.

About the author

Xuan Prada has been working professionally in the visual effects industry for more than 15 years. He has worked on feature animation, television, and feature films across some of the best VFX studios in the world, like MPC, Dneg, Framestore, or ILP. His credits include Happy Feet, Prometheus, Iron Man, World War Z, Godzilla, Westworld, The Mandalorian or Lost in Space, among many others.

How can I buy this course?

You can get this course safely by clicking here. You will need a PayPal account or a credit card. Once the payment goes through you will have immediate access to all the videos and material files. No streaming, you can download everything.
The price of the course is 140EUR

Please let me know if you have any questions, you can reach me here.