Katana Fastrack patreon course by Xuan Prada

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 cover how to use the software and, 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 in this course are based on real-life experiences in the VFX industry, both working on film and television. This course aims to give you all the knowledge you need if you are joining a visual effects facility that uses Katana in its 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 is now available as a single purchase for everyone interested.

Content

This course covers a wide variety of topics, and its total length is around 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 scripts, etc. The Ant-Man asset is not available. You will also get direct support from the author via email.

Software

Katana is the industry leader in software for look-development and lighting for the visual effects and animation industry. Used by many studios around the world. We will 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.