Creative software developer Foundry has entered into an exclusive agreement with software R&D company J Cube to provide the Multiverse Studio toolset as a unified ecosystem for Katana and Maya.

As part of Foundry’s commitment to driving creativity, this new collaboration will allow artists to significantly reduce the time it takes to transport files between 3D applications--including Maya and Katana--freeing up more time to deliver creative work.

Berj Bannayan, partner and VFX supervisor at Soho VFX, said: “We’ve been using Multiverse here at Soho VFX for over a year, for our Alembic pipeline that incorporates Maya, Houdini and 3Delight. It’s been transformative for us, being used in everything from The Shallows to Ben Hur and Logan. The integration into our existing pipeline has been straightforward and we’ve been outputting some positively giant Alembic caches that we’re now handling easily. It’s great stuff!”

Multiverse Studio customers will have access to a commercially supported set of MaterialX, Alembic and USD tools unified in all Katana and Maya versions, on all platforms. This will help make customers’ investments work better for longer, without the need to develop in-house or upgrade due to incompatible versions.

Multiverse’s innovative toolset also solves wider industry problems. It allows for fast and memory efficient I/O, provides dynamic management of hierarchies in Maya and procedural geometry rendering, facilitating accurate motion blur for varying topology simulation caches in Maya and Katana. It also offers new functionality that allows retiming of geometry caches at render time, without the need to re-export geometry caches with adjusted motion samples.

Foundry will resell Multiverse Studio for Katana and Maya as interactive and batch licenses. The pricing scheme includes the first year of maintenance for each license type and activates Maya, Katana, plus any future DCC app implementations.

Jody Madden, chief product and customer officer at Foundry, commented: “We are excited to offer artists the opportunity to add Multiverse Studio to their Katana and Maya pipelines, helping to relieve the immense pressure to deliver better, faster and cheaper work. As well as supporting Pixar’s open source project and the industry demand for USD tools, we wanted to have a commercially supported ecosystem around Katana that simplifies the creative process. Ensuring that Katana is easily integrated into more pipelines is an important contribution to the VFX and animation industries, and we’re proud to be part of this exciting collaboration.”

Paolo Berto Durante, chief technical officer at J Cube Inc, commented: “Foundry has always been skilled at identifying innovative software solutions that improve the production experience and change the industry for the better. We are delighted Foundry’s attention is now focused on Multiverse, with this collaboration providing our tools to a larger audience, worldwide. We can’t wait to see what artists are going to create with it.”