Hey guys:
Just wanted to say hi. I am one of the outsider beta testers. I just got started and downloaded the latest build. Have not even installed it (been real busy). Wanted to get some advice. I want to try it out on my laptop… since this has become my primary testing computer. Should be pretty powerful with a core 2 duo and 2 gigs of ram. Also, was going to give it a try on my work computer. Anyway, the only thing I know about Krakatoa is that it is a point rendering system that looks similar to the late Doc Baily’s work. What would be great is if someone could give me a good solid intro into what I am looking at, and where it is, and where it will be going.
Welcome!
The laptop will do just fine. My home PC has only 1 GB of RAM and it is still fun to play with Krakatoa.
Krakatoa is not directly comparable to Doc’s Spore which was mainly a program to generate procedural particle systems in a multidimensional space. Doc also had a renderer to visualize the Spore, Krakatoa is the continuation of Frantic Films’ version of a point renderer which was originally developed to render Doc’s Spores faster and with better quality on Windows systems for a project we worked on together (“Stay”). But this was just the initial inspiration.
Later, Krakatoa was enhanced to perform volumetric shading, so now it is called Volumetric Particle Renderer. It can achieve results comparable to ray-marching rendering solutions, but typically with higher detail quality and in a fraction of the time. For example, our tests show amazing results with FumeFX using the fluid simulation part and Particle Flow, but the detail we can get out of the same low-res sim is orders of magnitude higher than what FumeFX would render from the same data.
You should download and read the Preliminary Documentation posted on the Builds board. While it uses a much older build of Krakatoa and the UI is almost unrecognizable, the basic ideas behind the system are explained in great clarity.
You can also take a quick look at the CG-Talk thread about Krakatoa:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=206&t=445722
It has some simple examples and not so simple explanations of the history and practices.
Cheers,
Borislav “Bobo” Petrov
Technical Director 3D VFX
Frantic Films Winnipeg
Hi Chris - good to see more vray folks over here 
Just curious bobo, what type of particle counts are used for the likes of the volumetric teapot renders? I’m assuming from the level of detail in them that it’s a multi-pass krakatoa render via deadline (gonna try that out today) since the results you are getting are so smooth!
The only hold up I’m getting in rendering is because of pflow trying to calculate everything but krakatoa is lighting quick!
How’s progress on depth of field going?
Hi Chris - good to see more
vray folks over here
Just curious bobo, what type
of particle counts are used
for the likes of the
volumetric teapot renders? I’m
assuming from the level of
detail in them that it’s a
multi-pass krakatoa render via
deadline (gonna try that out
today) since the results you
are getting are so smooth!
Here is a quote from my CG-Talk post:
“…This example contains 100 frames of 1 million particles. Rendering time on single CPU Athlon64 2.1 GHz with just 1GB of RAM was 22 seconds per frame incl. PFlow calculations, lighting and shading with 4 passes of motion blur. (each pass shaded in approx. 3 seconds, so 12 seconds was shading, the rest was calculating the flow and the lighting).”
So no, it wasn’t even a good computer - I intend to put 4GB into my home PC because 1GB is really not enough for heavy stuff.
But the volumetric teapot scene used only surface emission, not the whole volume (PFlow cannot use the volume of a teapot correctly because a teapot has really really bad geometry to start with).
The only hold up I’m getting
in rendering is because of
pflow trying to calculate
everything but krakatoa is
lighting quick!
The workflow is to try with very few particles until you like the general look, then increase the count and dump to PRT file once. Then you can disable PFlow, create a Loader and play with lighting, shading and texture mapping without the wait.
How’s progress on depth of
field going?
Don’t you read the Builds board? :oO
0.9.8 was posted on Friday and has DOF working in Max and Brazil Cameras, among other things.
*Create a Max Camera
*Add “Depth Of Filed (mental ray)” multipass effect
*Enable the effect
*Set the F-Stop in the effect
*Adjust the target distance to define the focus distance
*Render in Krakatoa 0.9.8
The DOF Sample Rate controls the quality.
Brazil r/s 1.x cameras have their own F-Stop value, just enable DOF in the camera and you are ready to go.
Brazil 2.0 or V-Ray cameras are not supported yet.
Cheers,
Borislav “Bobo” Petrov
Technical Director 3D VFX
Frantic Films Winnipeg
>Don't you read the Builds
>board? :oO
>
>0.9.8 was posted on Friday and
>has DOF working in Max and
>Brazil Cameras, among other
>things.
>
I'm a few hours ahead so I was well into my whiskies at that stage ;)
Don't be shy to write a tiny tutorial on how you made that cool Krakatoa/FumeFX test Bobo! 
We got our FumeFX last week and I started learning it and playing around, would be neat to learn even more combo tricks!