Constraining things in Katana works well, but can seem somewhat limited if you are coming from a full-featured 3D application. One of the things that can potentially give you headaches is a missing option for “maintaining offset” when you are constraining one object or a lightrig to something else. While this is generally not an issue when you are doing LookDev (as your assets most likely have zero’d out transforms) it can be a bit frustrating to not have that option when you are working on shots, so here’s my hacky way of maintaining constraint-offsets.
One of the worst things to sample for any brute-force ray tracer are specular highlights / reflections with a low roughness in motion blur. Even worse so on fine displacements or bump. And EVEN more worse with lots of small highlights. When all of these things come together sampling these highlights in motionblur is going to become really hard and with conventional methods you will end up having to rely on extemely high AA samples and even then the highlight-streaks will most likely still be dotty… And you won’t make any friends if they have to paint these streaks smooth in Comp :) So during the crunch time of a recent project I was brain storming with some of my collegues how this could potentially be fixed without needing too much samples and I’ve been working on implementing that idea which seems to work quite nicely.
Judging from some messages I received recently there seems to be an ongoing interest on using Linux at home on your Desktop. Some people might want to try it out, because they are searching for an alternative to Windows or OS X or just because they want to try out something new and explore the possibilities of Linux. But there are a few things to consider before getting into the world of Linux and most people are a bit overwhelmed at where to start exactly so I will try to give some tips that helped me personally in setting up a working system, alongside some examples why Linux is my personal favorite.
One of the great things about Katana is the ability to have a simple compositor right within your lighting/lookdev environment. I have been using its 2D features more or less extensively throughout the last couple of projects. It’s quite handy to tweak your HDR that you’re using right before you plug it into an environment light, without the need to go into Nuke again if you’re doing just smaller tweaks. Unfortunately Katana’s 2D interface lacks quite a few things that would make it a valueable alternative to Nuke for preparation tasks, because you have to wire more things together. So I was working on a few ‘gizmos’ to make the process a bit less cumbersome.