This series will go over some of the basic principles of Katana.
If you're picking it up for the first time, this is a good place to start.
We will be making the scene files available as we go along so you can get hold of the scenes and follow them throughout the tutorials.
We will be using 3Delight which ships with Katana 3v1. So if you have that version, 3Delight will already be set up.
If you're using any other renders then this tutorial series can still help since general workflow doesn't really change across different renderers.
Before I start I'd like to show you where you can find tutorials and documentation related to Katana.
If you go to the "Help" menu and click "Online Help" then this will take you to the learn Katana page.
You can see the documentation and tutorials.
This can be a really good place to refer back to.
If you go to the "Help" menu then you can also find "Example Projects".
These are scenes that you can select and open.
It’s well documented, the comments are put in the form of backdrops.
You have comments at every step so you can follow what is happening.
I'll close this and go back into my scene. I'm first going to give you a tour of the UI to get you familiar with the interface.
The 3D viewer is where you view the 3D assets in your scene, so your cameras, your lights, and your geometry.
You can navigate this by scrolling to zoom in and out, by middle-mouse dragging to translate, and ALT left-button dragging to rotate.
Press F if you want to focus your view on an object.
Now, I have nothing selected so our viewer is empty.
We do have elements in the scene but when you open any Katana scene your viewer will always be empty.
This is because your scene graph is collapsed. You can expand this to reveal your scene elements. If I expand the mesh level, the geometry will appear in the 3D viewer.
You can press F to focus your view on that asset.
If you double-click on the "root" level of your scene graph this will collapse everything.
If you double-click on it again this will expand everything. Now the entire content of the scene is visible.
The idea is that if you have a really heavy scene with lots of geometry, you don't necessarily need to see everything in the 3D viewer.
You can be selective and only see what you need so the deferred loading element in Katana is really useful.
You only process the data if you're calling it in the viewer or if the renderer is calling it while rendering.
If you have a huge terrain, for example, and you don't like how one element is looking you could send a quick preview render.
That's what I've done over here.
If I collapse everything in the scene graph, then using this colour picker, if I hold Ctrl and left-button drag then you can drop it on an element.
Then hit the arrow, choose "Select in Scene Graph" and this will then take the path and display that asset.
This is how you can use the scene graph to control what you are processing and viewing in the 3D viewer.
You can use the monitor to help identify certain assets.
We're now going to take a look at the node graph.
This is pretty much the heart of your scene, so everything is being driven by these nodes.
The way data flows in Katana is from top to bottom.
If I zoom in you can see this little box.
If I select this, it will activate the viewer flag. Or if I hover over a node and hit V on my keyboard then this will this will activate the viewer flag also.
If I collapse the scene graph and walk down my scene then you can see.
First of all we have our geometry and then we'll bring in our camera.
This is appearing over here, and we have our materials and then finally we're adding our lights.
This is how you see the state of your scene at any particular point and track what is happening.
Now we're going to take a look at the "parameters" tab over here.
This will display the parameters of the nodes for which your edit flag is activated.
You can activate the edit flag by selecting this little box on the right. This will activate your "parameters" tab. As you can see, this is updating.
If you want to display the parameters of multiple nodes you can hover your cursor over your other node and press Shift + E. You'll now have visibility over the parameters of both nodes.
If you hover over any node and press E, this will just display that parameter on its own.
These are the tabs we will mainly be working with in this series.
You can take a look around and some of the other tabs and see what they can do.
This was a very brief overview and I will be going into more depth as we go along.
Please comment and give us suggestions, this will give us a better idea as to what to cover in future videos.