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# Katana 3.1v2 Release Notes

# Release Date

18 December 2018

# Previous Releases

• Katana 3.1v1 Release Notes

# System Requirements

## Officially Supported Operating Systems

- Windows 7 64-bit or higher
- Linux 64-bit operating system (CentOS/RHEL 6)

## Hardware Requirements

| Minimum | Recommended
--- | --- | ---
CPU | Dual-core processor
Storage | 1+ GB available for installation
System RAM | 1+ GB available
Graphics RAM | 1+ GB available | 2+ GB available
Display | 800 x 600 | 1920 x 1080
OpenGL | OpenGL 4.3+

'Recommended' does not guarantee that it meets your particular needs

## Tested Workstation Hardware

The configurations listed below are those that Foundry have tested with Katana. Due to the constantly changing nature and wide variety of computer hardware available in the market, Foundry is unable to officially certify hardware. The list below can be used as a recommendation and does not guarantee that it meets your particular needs.

- NVIDIA Quadro M4000

- NVIDIA Quadro P4000

- NVIDIA Quadro K4000

- NVIDIA Quadro K6000

Please download and install the latest graphics driver from the NVIDIA website.

If you encounter any issues, please contact Customer Support directly through the Support Portal at the following address: https://support.foundry.com.

# What's New in Katana 3.1

These release notes describe changes from Katana 3.1v1 to 3.1v2.

For a high-level overview of all changes in the Katana 3.1 line, please see What's New in Katana 3.1.

# New Features

## ProfilingMockRenderer

- A new example renderer plug-in is now shipped with Katana: ProfilingMockRenderer. The plug-in performs no rendering of pictures. Instead, its purpose is to profile Katana's scene graph expansion from the context of a renderer plug-in, implementing different traversal strategies for accessing scene graph location data. The plug-in's source code is available in plugins/Src/.

  As part of adding the ProfilingMockRenderer example, the existing Renderer Plug-ins page in the Katana Developer Guide has been split into two sections: Overview and Render API. The new plug-in is documented in a new section named Profiling Mock Renderer.

# Feature Enhancements

## Hydra Viewer

- TP 354958 - Pressing the H key while the pointer is over the Viewer (Hydra) tab will now hide selected locations. All previously hidden locations can be unhidden by either pressing the U key or clicking the new UI button that is displayed when objects are hidden.

# Bug Fixes

- TP 366282 - Multisample and shutter attributes from render settings were not passed to RendererInfoBase::fillRenderTerminalOps() .

- TP 366290 - The Find in Node Graph context menu option in the Catalog tab was not working.

- TP 366537 - The tooltips display on parameters and attributes were incorrectly including the names of pages that a parameter or attribute may be a part of. This was misleading to users interested in accessing parameters or attributes by their full name from a scripting, programming, or AttributeSet context, which does not work with names of pages.

- TP 367056 - The Viewer and Viewer (Hydra) tabs would briefly show the incorrect view when switching between multipane layouts.

- TP 367570 - Memory leaks and potential crashes could occur due to the Viewer API retaining attributes incorrectly.

- TP 371755 - (Windows only) Katana would crash when dragging catalog images to the Underlay and Overlay slots in the Monitor tab.

- TP 373110 - When using Unicode characters in text of Backdrop nodes drawn in a Node Graph tab, Katana could crash due to the wrapping of lines having been implemented by character bytes, rather than by characters or words, wrongly causing non-ASCII codepoints to be split.

- TP 373216 - Actions that did not have any shortcut assigned displayed None in the UI, rather than not having an entry.

  As part of fixing this, tooltips of buttons in the Monitor tab were modified to conform to the following new tooltip style:

      Action Name [Shortcut]

      Further information.

- TP 373363 - After the creation of a GafferThree package via choosing a context menu item failed, mouse events were wrongly sent to widgets in Katana tabs as QContextMenuEvent objects, rather than QMouseEvent objects, leading to exceptions in various places in the codebase, making it impossible to continue working with the current UI session.

- TP 374134 - When attempting to call FnAttribute::Bootstrap() without a valid license, Katana would crash. Now, the program terminates with a relevant message written to the console instead.

- TP 374209 - Katana 3.1v1 introduced various improvements to Katana's event handling systems. One of those changes affected how often images in the Monitor tab are redrawn during rendering, in response to receiving image data from a renderer plug-in. An environment variable was introduced that controls the size of the buffer used for items in Katana's image buffer catalog: KATANA_CATALOG_RECT_UPDATE_BUFFER_SIZE. The variable defaulted to a value of 256, which resulted in an impression of slower than expected redraws of images in Katana's Monitor tab. The default value of the environment variable has been changed to 32 now, which provides a good balance of redrawing the images often enough to give artists a better interactive experience, but not unnecessarily often.

## Hydra Viewer

- TP 366530 - Curves which had no basis provided, or an invalid basis such as '0', were wrongly displayed as linear line segments.

  Please note that as the basis is also required to determine the vstep, widths will only be displayed if a vstep has been explicitly provided. If no vstep can be determined then a default width is used.

- TP 371749 - Selection updates would not take into account objects that were excluded from the scene, ether by being hidden or not included in the Viewer Visibility Working Set.

- TP 372974 - Bezier, B-spline and Catmull-Rom curve types were not handled and displayed by the Viewer (Hydra) tab.

  The following are currently not supported by Katana's Hydra Viewer. A warning will be produced but the curve will not be displayed:

  - Hermite or Power curve types.
  - Closed or periodic curves.
  - Curves with an invalid degree. Valid degrees are 1 (linear) and 3 (cubic).

## Python tab

- TP 69652 / BZ 35996 - With more than one Python tab open, accessing the tab's history using Alt+Up or Alt+Down would trigger a Python exception and fail to recall command history.

- TP 371992 - When pressing Shift+Enter in the command area of the Python tab, a soft newline was inserted, leading to issues with indentation of Python source code. Now, when pressing Shift+Enter, a regular newline is inserted.

## Documentation

- TP 367068 - Colon characters were incorrectly present for certain parameters and return values in several sections of the Katana Developer Guide.

- TP 370802 - The developer documentation of the buildRenderObjectInfo() function of the RendererInfoBase class refers to the public configureBasicRenderObjectInfo() function and the protected addRenderObjectParam() function of the same class, but the documentation of both of those functions was not included in the Katana Developer Guide, which resulted in missing links.

- TP 372159 - The Python code snippet in the RenderManager section of the Working with Nodes » Example Scripts page in the Katana Developer Guide was missing a value for the render method name parameter of the RenderManager.StartRender() function, which could lead to exceptions from event handlers that were registered for the "renderStarted" event type.

- TP 372834 - Documentation for the Configuration Python module was missing.

# Known Issues

## Live Groups

- TP 85118 / BZ 41152 - When editing parameters of a node that is part of a LiveGroup node and reloading the parent LiveGroup node, the UI state of the Parameters tab is reset. This includes scroll bar positions, selections of items, and selections of nested tabs (for example Object, Material and Linking tabs for a Gaffer node).

- TP 84998 / BZ 41092 - When reloading a LiveGroup node's parameter interface and contents from its source, parameters of child nodes that are edited in floating panes disappear from those panes.

- TP 84020 / BZ 40598 - Reverting a LiveGroup node does not revert its user parameters.

- TP 84019 / BZ 40599 - Parameters that are added to LiveGroup nodes are wrongly discarded when performing a reload from source, leading to loss of data.

- TP 84018 / BZ 40600 - Undoing a revert of an unpublished LiveGroup node does not restore the LiveGroup's editable and modified state.

- TP 83061 / BZ 40237 - Nodes can be dragged into the Group bubble of a non-editable LiveGroup node.

## Materials

- TP 269449 - Choosing Edit Shader Parameters from the main wrench menu of Material nodes does not show wrench buttons next to shader parameters. This can be worked around by toggling the edit flag on the node.

- TP 199304 - The namespace parameter on Material nodes wrongly allows the insertion of Unicode codepoints outside the ASCII range.

- TP 191052 - Katana does not have any support for the texture reference object workflows of V-Ray for Maya.

## Parameter Expressions

- TP 188533 - Expressions linked to non-local parameters on not previously edited Material nodes can't be evaluated.

- TP 105434 / BZ 47520 - Reference Expressions may not refer to dynamic parameters such as shader parameters.

- TP 60457 / BZ 31790 - Setting an array or group parameter to an expression results in an invalid expression. Upon setting a valid expression (for example, an evaluation of an equivalent parameter on another node using getParam), the parameter is not immediately updated. To workaround this issue, close and reopen the parameter, or flush caches while the node is not edited.

## Qt 5

- TP 356345 - Partially covering the Hydra Viewport with a floating tab will cause it to repaint continuously.

## Rendering

- TP 344118 - (Windows only) When installing Katana and opting to install the bundled version of 3Delight, the installation of 3Delight is made by modifying system-wide environment variables such as KATANA_RESOURCES. Thereafter, launching any version of Katana will pick up this installation of 3Delight, which may be incompatible with the version of Katana being launched.

  NOTE: This does not affect Linux, where a bundled 3Delight installation is tied to its corresponding Katana installation.

- TP 208802 - Closing the Histogram tab after use leaves the Monitor tab unable to display rendered images.

- TP 176598 - Use of nodes that modify Graph State Variables in Interactive Render Filters is not currently supported.

- TP 114182 / BZ 49288 - When exporting a Catalog item you need to specify the export folder path to an existing folder. If the folder you're trying to export to does not exist on disk Katana will fail to export.

- TP 94052 / BZ 44199 - The Repeat Previous Render menu command only works on renders started from a 3D node's context menu.

- TP 74799 / BZ 36926 - The rendererSettings > displayOptions parameter of a RenderOutputDefine node for the PRMan renderer, shown when its type parameter is set to 'raw', cannot be set using the Parameters tab.

- TP 12517 / BZ 16168 - Only one Monitor tab may display the results of a Preview Render. The use of multiple Monitor tabs is not currently supported.

## Widgets

- TP 123558 / BZ 50911 - When changing an array parameter's tuple count/size, any corresponding attributes are not properly updated in the Attributes tab.

- TP 65347 / BZ 34949 - Using Compiz can lead to text fields not receiving focus events correctly due to an incompatibility between Compiz and Qt. Depending on your configuration, disabling Compiz "desktop effects" may resolve the problem.

## Miscellaneous

- TP 337653 - Katana logs deprecation warnings when loading the PyMockAsset, PyMultiMockAsset and PyMockFileSeq shipping example Asset API plug-ins.

- TP 218742 - (Windows only) Katana must be installed to a path no longer than ~140 characters. Attempting to install to a longer path results in an unintuitive error: "The system cannot find the path specified."

- TP 112544 / BZ 49051 - The Viewer tab may lose sync with the Scene Graph tab when changes to expansion state are interrupted.

- TP 107038 / BZ 47853 - Indication of attribute source nodes (such as the yellow 'glow' in the Node Graph tab) is unavailable as of Katana 2.0v1.

- TP 84326 / BZ 40709 - The Alembic library does not support multiple process or thread access to an Alembic file. This means that a crash occurs when modifying an Alembic file outside Katana, while it's loaded in an open Katana scene. To avoid this, you must Flush Caches before attempting to update any modified Alembic files.

- TP 80738 / BZ 39261 - Operations that lock and unlock nodes do not currently create entries in the Undo History, which can lead to an incorrect node graph state when undoing and redoing operations.

- TP 71965 / BZ 36691 - State badges are currently shown for attribute values of dynamic array child parameters, even though only their parent array parameter should appear with a state badge.

- TP 70217 / BZ 36176 - The 2D node Disk Render Upstream Render Outputs option does not use the batch render method, batchRender, for upstream render nodes, instead using diskRender.

- TP 70196 / BZ 36170 - Control keys (notably arrow keys) do not function as expected in shell mode.