The most significant changes in Katana 7.0 include new native USD workflows for pipelines, based on the Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD) framework. Despite Katana's ability to import USD data for several years, the new Native USD framework, built on the same low-level architecture as the new 3D system in Nuke based on USD, is expected to deliver higher performance when dealing with very large production assets. It incorporates new nodes for creating and working with USD Stages and should be more customizable: studios can create their own nodes and engines, as well as integrate their own version of USD instead of Katana's FnUsd library.
The existing USD framework, which uses the Geolib scene processing engine, and the new Native USD framework will be provided in parallel for the "foreseeable future."
Among the updates to existing features, OpenVDB volume support in the Hydra viewer has been added. Additionally, Live Rendering has become multi-threaded, which has increased rendering speed "up to two times." Geolib3-MT runtime has been optimized for better memory performance and now supports three alternative scene caching modes.
For integrating workflows, Katana 7.0 supports the CY2023 specification for the VFX Reference Platform, as well as USD 23.05 and Rocky Linux as the successor to CentOS. Foundry adheres to the same standards in the latest versions of their other key applications, such as Nuke 15.0, released last month, and the upcoming Mari 7.0.
Katana 7.0 is available for Windows 10 and Rocky Linux 9. The software is now only available through subscription. Since the release of Katana 6.0, the cost of a subscription for Katana Interactive has increased to $4,199 per year. The subscription cost for Katana Render is $323 per year.