Release Date

30 April 2026

Previous Releases

• Katana 8.5v1 Release Notes

Feature Enhancements

Documentation

• ID 613912 - A new Parameter Policy page is added in the Customizing the User Interface section of the developer guide.

Katana <> Nuke

• ID 495384 - In Interactive Comps, newly created KatanaReader or KatanaWriter nodes in Nuke will appear automatically in the Nuke Bridge tab in Katana, without having to save the Nuke Script and reload it.
• ID 506461 - A new KATANA_NUKE_EXTRA_ARGUMENTS environment variable has been introduced that allows the user to define extra command-line arguments that are forwarded to the Nuke executable when it is launched from Katana's Nuke Bridge. See Environment Variables page in the Katana Developer Guide for details.
• ID 546756 - Preferences for adjusting the refresh internal in Live and Interactive Comps have been added to the Nuke Bridge under a new nukeBridge section in the Preferences dialog:

  • nukeBridge.refreshInterval: The interval (in seconds) at which render updates in Katana are sent to Nuke in Live and Interactive Comps. Lower values mean more frequent updates, at the expense of potentially saturating the system. Default is 0.5 seconds.
  • nukeBridge.interactiveRefreshInterval: In Interactive Comps, the interval (in seconds) at which compositing updates in Nuke are sent to Katana. Lower values mean more frequent updates, at the expense of potentially saturating the system. Default is 0.5 seconds.
• ID 612181 - Support for Nuke 16.1 and Nuke 17.0 has been added to the Nuke Bridge.
• ID 614516 - A thumbnail of the mapped Catalog Item is now shown next to the KatanaReader input points in the Nuke Bridge tab.

Licensing

• ID 613946 - Tsuba will now require a Geolib3 Render License to initialize.

Quality of Life

• ID 80745 - When saving a custom layout, the option to save floating panes and docked widgets now default to true.

• ID 606178 - When a TeleParameter pointed to a user parameter whose popup options (set via setHintString), or name changed, the TeleParameter did not update its hosted widget to reflect the new options or name.

• ID 609933 - Clicking  > Show User Parameters Above Node Parameters while editing the user parameters on a ShadingGroup node will show the user parameters above the Node Parameters and Material Interface tabs.
• ID 611561 - Timestamps are now visible for each undo entry in the Undo History tab.

Rendering

• ID 507109 - A parameter has been added to RenderOutputDefine nodes to allow setting EXR compression level, when appropriate.

  The following bindings have been added to our OpenEXR Python module for getting and setting default compression levels:

  • OpenEXR.SetDefaultZipCompressionLevel
  • OpenEXR.GetDefaultZipCompressionLevel
  • OpenEXR.SetDefaultDwaCompressionLevel
  • OpenEXR.GetDefaultDwaCompressionLevel

  No upgrade scripts have been added for the new compression level parameters; existing nodes will need to be recreated.

UI

• ID 612639 - GenericAssigned-based node types can now provide arbitrary hints in the hints attribute in the top-level <args>  tag in the XML document. For instance, it can be used to customize the helpURL hint.
• ID 614514 - Preferences in the Preferences dialog are no longer sorted alphabetically. Instead, their logical, declaration order is preserved.

USD Native

• ID 554928 - GroupStack and GroupMerge nodes are now rendered using the Native USD colors (i.e. blue sidebar) when adopting USD child nodes.
• ID 610705 - USD-related log messages are prefixed with "FnUSD" instead of "HydraViewer".

UsdSuperLayer

• ID 610836 - A new Copy Composed option is available in the UsdSuperLayer and its derived nodes' right-click context menu. This copies upstream data and changes and pastes a duplicated version with the result of all opinions on the prim rather than just the edits. Additionally, the Ctrl+Shift+C keyboard shortcut can be used.
• ID 612844 - Duplicate is added to the Right-click menu in UsdSuperLayer. It performs a composed copy and paste of the selected prim.
• ID 614203 - UsdSuperLayer now loads payloads as needed (e.g., when expanding tree item children), allowing artists to effectively inspect the entire stage.

Viewer

• ID 615892 -

  • When switching to the AVP render delegate, terminal spam/error messages would appear.
  • When using the AVP render delegate:
    • When using an asset with transformation keyframed to change over time, the click selection on a mesh in the viewer did not always work correctly.
    • Switching view mode to Wireframe/Point sometimes caused terminal error messages to appear.
    • OpenVDB assets brought in via UsdIn were not displayed.
    • Positions of instances were not being affected by TransformEdit or Transform3D nodes.
    • Interactions with the viewer (such as mouse dragging to select or collapsing and expanding the scene graph) could cause terminal spam and Katana to go into a non-responsive state.
    • Loading a HDR with 'render background' of a reasonable production size in Windows could crash Katana or put it into a non responsive state.

Viewer Performance

• ID 609353 - Performance of interactive changes to sub-hierarchies within the USD scene has been improved in the Viewer Tab.

Viewer Tools

• ID 589220 - Native USD lights can now be looked through in the Viewer tab. This includes dragging and dropping USD lights from the Scene Explorer onto a viewport in a Viewer tab.

  In addition to this, the Look Through Selected Object button (K keyboard shortcut) in the Viewer tab now supports USD cameras and lights.
• ID 612590 - Lighting Tools manipulators in the Viewer tab now support USD lights that are generated with UsdGaffer nodes.

  Other components in the Lighting Tools (such as light creation or light material changes) do not yet support USD lights.
• ID 612608 - When multiple USD native objects (including a mix of locators and solid geometry) where manipulated using the manipulators in the Viewer tab, only one of the objects would interactively update its position while the manipulation was ongoing; the rest would only move to their final position on pen-up.

  When USD objects with concatenated pivot translates in their own xform and in their ancestors were manipulated using the manipulators in the Viewer tab, the interactive position during manipulation would be misplaced; objects would only snap to the correct position on pen-up.
• ID 612609 - Center of Interest manipulators in the Viewer tab now support USD cameras and USD lights that are generated with UsdCamera and UsdLight nodes respectively.
• ID 612610 - Lighting Tools manipulators in the Viewer tab now support USD lights that are generated with UsdLight nodes.

  Other components in the Lighting Tools (such as light creation or light material changes) do not yet support USD lights.

Bug Fixes

Catalog

• ID 589392 - When a Katana layout that has had the thumbnail column in a Catalog tab resized was loaded in Katana, thumbnails would fail to use a matching resolution that would fit the column's width, leading to pixelated thumbnails until the user would resize the thumbnail column.

Documentation

• ID 528265 - When using Windows operating system with the Nuke Bridge,  the @echo off, documented in the launcher template example, will prevent Katana from running executables that are not binary files. To resolve this, documentation for the KATANA_NUKE_EXECUTABLE environment variable has been extended with examples on how to define a launcher script that can define extra command-line arguments or extra environment variables.
• ID 604126 - When using the getLogicalSource, as mentioned in The Katana Developer Guide, will point to a false method. This has been updated and replaced with the correct method getInputSource.

Katana <> Nuke

• ID 589100 - When a KatanaReader node with a long name (16 characters or longer) was used in the Nuke Bridge in Katana with Nuke 15 (or newer), the comp would not succeed, and a message about a corrupt string would be seen in the Render Log tab.
• ID 614515 - When a Catalog Item was assigned to a KatanaReader input point in the Nuke Bridge tab, the representative text used for the Catalog Item could show a spurious newline character that would result in the text in the widget being clipped.

Katana Queue

• ID 614739 - When using newer USD versions, KatanaUsdPlugins would not build correctly against it with the described building markdown.

Logging

• ID 616579 - When using the UsdIn node, log messages were not being shown on Windows.

Miscellaneous

• ID 585036 - Creating a locator type within the primitiveCreate node would throw an error. 
• ID 612231 - When using the CMakeLists.txt file that is shipped with FnUsdShim, in some cases it would incorrectly handle finding the OpenSubdiv library.
• ID 612274 - When using some systems, Katana would crash on start-up when the verbosity is set to 2 or more.

Network Materials

• ID 584613 - When Soloing a material during a live render, its file path was not being resolved.
• ID 610350 - When renaming a material connected to the append input port of a NetworkMaterialSplice node, the Refresh button in the material.nodes section did not update the material name.
• ID 611759 - When converting material connections via the KatanaToUsd node, component type port connections would not be retained.
• ID 611883 - When effecting a Material Solo on an Arnold shader, the appended conversion network would cause albedo materials to render with diffuse light.

Performance

• ID 616424 - When using Linux systems with recent NVIDIA drivers (e.g. 580.95.05 or 590.48.01), NVIDIA could end up reducing the processor affinity in Katana on startup, from all available cores to a subset of the available cores. The altered processor affinity would end up leaking to the render process when it is spawned from Katana, which affect performance of the scene graph traversal and posterior rendering.

Python

• ID 583403 - When using the OCIO functionality in the Python tab, the CDLTransform would cause an error.
• ID 605886 - Importing from the submodule import of Katana.Callbacks would cause a "__spec__" no attribute error.
• ID 607271 - When plug-in types were reloaded with  Utils.Plugins.Load(..., reloadCached=True, ...), an exception would be raised due to uses of removed Python 2 built-in functions.

Rendering

• ID 583898 - When Live Rendering, the render plug-in functions stopLiveEditing() and stop() were not called at the end or at the start of a new session resulting in automatic termination. The environment variable `KATANA_CANCELLED_RENDER_PROCESS_GRACE_PERIOD` can be used now to set the time to wait for a renderer to perform cleanup operations before terminating it forcefully. 
• ID 612121 - When using the Foresight+ Services tab, it did not respond to session selection; Session Overview, Op Tree and Scene Graph tabs were not populated.
• ID 613746 - When the Katana Queue log files were inaccessible (e.g. if they were removed from the filesystem), an exception could be raised from the Katana Queue tab when the log files were opened using an external editor.

UI

• ID 80419 - Updating array policies would not trigger child policies to update. 
• ID 85855 - When making number type FnAttributes, if an incorrect value type is used, the error message would not give sufficient information.
• ID 168258 - When using the Monitor tab, changing AOV would not update the currently targeted pixel probe values.
• ID 219747 - Making edits on a node while using the Parameters tabs, would throw an error. This is now detached from the window hierarchy before close to prevent callbacks from referencing deleted widgets.
• ID 527890 - Framing on a Dot node while zoomed out would cause the border to be the incorrect thickness.
• ID 612729 - When the editor of a node with many GenericAssign-based parameter was shown in the Parameters tab, Katana could take longer to load the parameters compared to Katana 7.5.

  The issue was a consequence of the migration from PyQt (until Katana 7.5) to PySide (since Katana 8.0). See PYSIDE-3279 for extra details.
• ID 614706 - When viewing the Parameters tab, expansion triangles and lock icons were recalculated for every parameter even when nothing had changed, slowing the UI when many parameters were present.

USD Import

• ID 607997 - When importing a USD file that includes connections which do not adhere to USD standards, the UsdIn node would not print warnings
   
• ID 613539 - When importing materials with identical leaf names at different USD paths via UsdIn, the materials were sharing cached attribute values
• ID 614903 - When converting Half types, UsdIn would ignore single values and treat arrays as Vec3.

USD Native

• ID 588193 - When only the primPath property was set without setting the asset in UsdPayloadSet, an empty over prim was created.
• ID 604498 - When using multiple UsdSublayerAdd nodes together, only the last layer would export. 
• ID 608245 - Building against Katana's USD Plug-ins with your own USD, would fail to load some libraries. To prevent this issue, a LIB_PREFIX build option has been added to specify a prefix for KatanaUsdPlugins library file names.
• ID 611078 - A node, which targeted a collection whose fallback value for the includeRoot property has been overridden to true (e.g. the case with the lightLink and shadowLink collections in the LightAPI schema) would show misleading fallback values. The help text for the includeRoot parameter in the UsdCollection node type has been extended to describe the potentially misleading default value (false) .

UsdSuperLayer

• ID 611251 - When targeting a prim with the USL Shader tab active and the shader had many parameters (such as a PxrSurfaceShader with 154 shader parameters), the UI was slow to respond and could lock up while loading the tab.
• ID 612173 - When forcing a transform parameter to default in the UsdSuperLayer node, the local value was lost and reverted to a local state badge.
• ID 614039 - When setting back makeInteractive from No to Yes,  a target prim of "Center of Interest" was incorrect.
• ID 614408 - When a namespace and an attribute had the same name, an error message was displayed in parameter creations of UsdSuperLayer.
• ID 615137 - When a UsdSuperLayer-based node was connected downstream of nodes that produce a USD stage, the node would trigger the stage composition of the entire stage, without limiting it to only the hierarchy defined by its base prim path. This could lead to the unnecessary loading of payloads.
• ID 615634 - When using the UsdSuperLayer Context Menu, a debug log entry would be generated for each menu item, which caused delays opening the menu as it contained many items.

Viewer

• ID 606757 - Framing USD geometry in the Viewer tab would not work when upstream prims had their purpose set to anything other than default.
• ID 613246 - When Edge or Face Snapping strategies were used in the Viewer tab, the line width in the global GL state would be modified and not restored after drawing, leading to line drawings from other components (e.g. camera and light locators) to use a thicker line width.
• ID 614801 - Using the lighting tools while triggering the hotkey Shift-click on geometry in the Viewer tab would incorrectly attempt to create a light for a UsdGaffer node.

Known Issues

Hydra Viewer

• ID 580249 - When manipulating transformations for both Geolib and USD locations/prims at the same time, the manipulator handle will ping to the center of the USD mesh.

USD Native

• ID 579376 - Currently, Pattern-Based Collections does not support the use of the  include  and  exclude  widgets in conjunction with the  membershipExpression  widget on the UsdCollection node. This is due to a known issue with USD

  NOTE: More info can be found on the USD thread:  https://forum.aousd.org/t/problems-with-pattern-based-collections/1197/7. Katana's Pattern-Based Collection widget computes collection membership using membership expressions, therefore it does not currently handle relationship-mode collections correctly.
• ID 586965 - USD's stitch method for stitching layers doesn't retain blocked attributes.
• ID 587515 - The Centre of Interest manipulator is currently not supported in conjunction with USD prims. 
• ID 588881 - The pivotTranslate parameter on the UsdTransformEdit node currently have no effect.
• ID 618268 - After setting a transformation for a light within the UsdGaffer, the option Disable Interactive Transforms becomes unavailable from the treeview's right-click context menu. A workaround is to disable transforms within the Transform subtab by setting the makeInteractive property to No.

System Requirements

Officially Supported Operating Systems

• Windows 11
• Linux 64-bit operating system (Rocky Linux 9)

Hardware Requirements

	Minimum	Recommended
CPU	Dual-core processor
Storage	3.5+ GB available for installation
System RAM	1+ GB available
Graphics RAM	1+ GB available	2+ GB available
Display	1920 x 1080
OpenGL	OpenGL 4.5+ (see note below)

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 RTX 4000

• NVIDIA Quadro RTX A4000

• NVIDIA Quadro RTX A3000

• NVIDIA Quadro P4000

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.

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