Katana is out.

The Foundry has finally released the first version on their website and announced ILM has already purchased a site license.

Katana was developed at Sony Imageworks and has been their core lighting and look development platform for a fair number of big productions.

 Paired with either Arnold or PRman, Katana is reportedly a tremendous performance boost for artists lighting and shading 3D assets and environments.

Katana is Linux-only at this point, and price is undisclosed at The Foundry's website. Trust me, this in not software for the "shallow-pocketed" and "faint-of-pipeline".  This is a tool for studios with solid Linux pipelines and cash-fluent production revenues...

For more details, check out Katana's website.