User guide

2 Katana For The Impatient
This guide starts at the point Katana is installed, and licensed. For more information on installation and licensing, see
the Installation and Licensing chapter in the Katana User Guide.
What Is Katana?
Essentially Katana is a system that allows you to define what to render by using filters that can create and modify 3D
scene data. If you're familiar with concepts such as RenderMan's Procedurals and riFilters, think of Katana as being
like Procedurals and riFilters on steroids, with a node based interface to define which filters to use, and interactively
inspect their results.
Using filters you can arbitrarily create and modify scene data. You can, for example:
• Bring 3D scene data in from disk, such as from an Alembic geometry cache or camera animation data.
• Create a new instance of a material, such as a RenderMan or Arnold shader.
• Create cameras and lights.
• Manipulate transforms on cameras, lights and other objects.
• Use rule based expressions to set what materials are assigned to which objects.
• Isolate parts of the scene for different render passes.
• Merge scene components from a number of partial scenes.
• Specify which outputs - such as RenderMan AOVs - you want to use to render multiple- passes in a single renderer.
• Use Python scripting to specify arbitrary manipulation of attributes at any location in the scene hierarchy.