Udemy – KATANA | Mastering LookDev & Lighting for the VFX industry

Arvid Schneider is an established artist, who has been working in the professional VFX industry for more than 10 years. He has worked on big blockbusters like Captain Marvel, Aquaman, Ready Player One, Jurassic World, Transformers and many more.

Description

With his knowledge and expertise, Arvid has prepared a detailed course to get to know and understand the industry standard lighting and look development software Katana. This course will help you to jump-start your career by becoming an advanced lighting and shading TD in today's competitive industry.

Disclaimer

This course is tagged for all levels - but it gets Intermediate and Advanced fairly quickly!

This is a technical and artistic course which means that it will contain quite a lot of theory, bit also artistic hands-on lectures.

This course is using Katana for Windows and Arnold as the main software tools. (But all topics can be achieved on Linux or Mac workstations, the same applies for other renderers).

Mastering Katana

Gain real production insights

Fully understand how to work within Katana and to understand important workflows

Create your own powerful macros and templates to organize your work

Technical course on how to create advanced templates within Katana

Advanced LookDev and Lighting practices

Opscripts, Graph State Variables, Reference Expressions, Macros, Live Groups, Variable Switches

Brief Overview

Introduction to Katana - installation, navigation, UI

Principles of Look Development and Lighting

Creating advanced and versatile Look and Lighting templates

Look development of production assets

Shot lighting of production assets

Rendering shots

Compositing

Accomplishments

You will be able to fully work with Katana at a high level.

Directly jump into a VFX company with advanced knowledge in templates and workflows.

Create and customize custom workflows.

Develop tools and macros.

What this course is NOT

Not teaching a specific renderer (Course is applicable to other renderers).

Not about modelling, texturing or animation.

Will not teach about Python or Lua or other programming languages.

Who this course is for:

Students who want to work professionally in the VFX industry and need a good understanding of the software Katana
Beginner level artists curious to learn VFX standards
Artists who want to add another set of tools to their toolbag

Course content

Introduction
Introduction
Preparation and Installation
Installing Arnold for Katana
Environment Variables
Adding Additional Resources
Katana | Fundamentals
Introduction
Configuration and Layout
Navigating and Viewing
Dataflow
Structuring the Template
Lookdev and Lighting Principles
Preparation of Upstream Departments
Arnold Overview
Introduction
Cross DCC plugins - MtoA, KtoA, HtoA, C4DtoA, MAXtoA
Fundamentals of Arnold Course
Look Development
Introduction
Arnold Shading Node Shortcut Extension
Basic Look Development Workflows
Child Materials and Automatic Assignments
Basic Principles and KLF Baking
Turntable Template Setup
Lighting Template for Lookdev
Lighting
Introduction
Introduction to Gaffer
Introduction to Monitor and Catalog
Arbitrary Output Variables - AOVs
Render Outputs
Katana | Advanced
Introduction
Adding Resolutions
Interactive Render Filter IRF
Expressions
Variable Switches
Graph State Variables
Live Groups
Macros
Opscripts
Katana | Becoming the Master
Introduction
Lookdev Template
Asset Lookdev
Lighting Template
Shot Lighting
More Shot Lighting
Render Passes
Comping those shots
Recreate the whole course
Additional Lectures
Introduction