I have been using 1.5.0 for awhile (try not to upgrade in production unless need be?) but upgraded to the latest build to take advantage of the addition of curve op to try the density falloff that was shown in some of the examples in the documentation. After upgrading i’ve seem to have lost the channels rollout? When i click on the button it simply won’t open. Is this a bug or did i mess something up here… any help would be grand thanks!
max2009 x64
cheers!
Have you looked under the “Manage Krakatoa GUI Rollouts” rollout to make sure it is not hidden?
It cannot float out of sight because if it tries to open outside of the desktop, it would be moved back to become visible.
It should be there somewhere.
ahhhhhh — i didn’t even realize you could do that! I didn’t know about hiding rollouts… my bad! Thanks for the help… I have another questions reguarding some voxel issues but i’m trying to sort through them myself and see if i’m missing some odd step… i was doing a version of the thick smoke clouds walkthrough that you did but i’ve been getting some random artifacts in the render – i’ll report back if i fail and post some images 
thanks again as always… 
well – ok i com eback asking for help after bumping my head all night on this. I guess i have two issues that could be related, could be 2 separate things. The first is my inability to get the age/lifespan to density kcm to work properly. And the second issue is artifacts showing up with voxels and not points. Baseing all of these test on the thick smoke tutorial and density by age tutorial. My first mistake i learned people were having issues with using an age test operator that put the particles into a new flow with a delete op, instead changed this to the delete by age op. This I thought solved my problems with the density by age but really didnt. The artifcats issue i feel is coming from the pflow source birth or something, since its happening at the bottom of the plume.
sorry if again i’ve missed the obvious. i’ve tried to check, double check my homework and search around on the fourms… screenshots to give a visual guide to my foolishness.
particles on right, voxels on left.
this is the density mapped to the color channel, its there!
so you can see there is some white at the bottom, but its like a handful of the particles… i tried doing all the variations of this, inverted, with curve, with power op, and with different float values to see if i could get any results.
First of all, have you tried downloading the current Beta of 1.5.2 to see if the problems you are having are still visible there?
(I am pretty sure you have access to the Beta forums).
The Density flow looks ok to me. Not sure why it does not work for you.
For me it is usually helpful to output a small amount (every 100th) particle to a CSV file and just read through the data to see what is in the Age and LifeSpan channels (they could be just plain wrong). We hope to add better debugging tools to MagmaFlow in the future so you could see what values are actually coming in and out.
i’ll grab the beta and see what happens, i’ll post when i get an update
ok – i think i’ve tracked down to what was causing me this issue but i’m still not sure why.
I started making this tutorial. software.primefocusworld.com/sof … troduction
not having box#3 I made the script op and the density goes wild and does the black areas (artifacts/errors). not knowing what the script
does, is there something in there that is making it act funky? Or am i doing something wrong here?
very confused. 
I would suggest PRINTING the values you are producing inside the script to make sure they are in the desired range.
Black pixels in the renderer usually mean Indeterminate values (right-click a pixel in the VFB and read the color values to see if they make sense).
This could happen if LifeSpan is not initialized due to a missing Delete operator in the event for example…
thanks bobo! at least now i’ve tracked it try and figure out the values and their reasoning for being so excessive! and their reasoning for being so excessive!
