Attached is the first draft of our Krakatoa documentation in Word format.
There are very likely technical errors and basic editing errors throughout, so feedback is most welcome. We are just starting our internal technical review of the document, but we were anxious to get something into the hands of our beta testers.
Attached is a simple particle system used in the "Getting Started" section of the User's Guide.
The sample scene Krakatoa_Basics_tk100.max features a Particle Flow system set to render as Phantoms.
In Beta Build 0.9.6, there is a new set of controls to define the types of particle systems to be rendered. The option to render PFlow Phantom particles is UNCHECKED by default, causing the sample scene to render a black frame with 0 particles if rendered as is.
Be sure to check the >PFlow Phantom option when rendering this sample scene.
NOTE: Krakatoa does not actually render any geometry from a PFlow set to Geometry. If you have disabled or deleted the Shape operator, the system will not contain any geometry information. Krakatoa will only read particle positions and velocities from the PFlow. This means that from Krakatoa’s point of view, there is no practical difference between flows set to render as Geometry or Phantom.
Thus, the Geometry, Phantom, BBox and None options in the Render operator can be seen solely as filters to determine which particle systems or events within a flow to be rendered and which not. Since a PFlow is set to Geometry by default, Krakatoa now provides this option as checked by default, as well as Legacy Particles, Thinking Particles and Particle Loaders.
See the topic
http://support.franticfilms.com/wb/default.asp?action=9&boardid=4&read=311&fid=23
for an example how this can be useful in practice.
Just a reminder that the Online Documentation WIKI is now available (it is Work In Progress, too, but contains a lot more info than the original draft):
http://support.franticfilms.com/manuals