The Pixar Animation Studios and Foundry have declared a concerted technological cooperation to bring KATANA and Render Man unitedly, making a mixed best of breed toolset for high end rendering and lighting.

It’s designed to offer every user of KATANA with fast and easy access to Pixar’s Academy Award winning rendering technology utilized for the stunning visual effects seen in the majority of today's feature films.

KATANA, the first lighting tool from The Foundry, and Pixar’s Render Man which has been recognized as the industry standard VFX and animation rendering, were both used together to great effect on Disney and Pixar’s acclaimed short “The Blue Umbrella,” which was played in theatres with “Monsters University.”

The plugin makes it possible to use Render Man shaders and new features of Render Man Pro Server 18 such as path tracing and geometric area lights inside Katana.

To use it, you will require running Render Man Pro Server 18 and Katana 1.5 or 1.6. Katana is available on Linux only, so there are no Windows or Mac OS X versions.