Hi guys,
Krakatoa is throwing fatal errors when rendering in Deadline and particles are missing, which is often the case - some elements start at different times than others. Sometimes this is avoidable - in PRT loaders I can say load only the range that has particles, but with PRT FumeFX for example, I can’t. It would be great if it was being treated in a more flexible way. Same thing with Frost.
For PRT Loaders, there is also a special switch in the Main Controls rollout of the Krakatoa GUI (Advanced Overrides > Ignore Missing PRTs) that lets you ignore missing particle files. It took a lot of discussion to add it because the lead developer at the time wanted anything that looks like an error to be reported as one to avoid bad frames from being produced with the user’s knowledge, while the end users wanted to be able to render tests on Deadline without having all partitions ready.
But when it comes to FumeFX, we have no special handling and I will log this as a Wish / Bug report. If PRT FumeFX cannot find data in the Fume object, then most probably that data does not exist and it should shut up and create zero particles… It isn’t really Krakatoa’s problem whether FumeFX has data or not…
Sounds good. That should also be the behavior of Frost - if it receives with no particles in it, it should just do nothing.
Investigating further - it’s not the base PRTFumeFX object that’s causing it, but the magma nodes on top. I’d say that’s quite an important issue, since there’s now no way to render two PRT streams when one starts after the first frame.
Ok, you can add a prt maker with one particle and the necessary channels, so there is always one in the stream. Works, but not the prettiest thing 
But no solution for PRT FFX, for example.
I feel like there needs to be a general solution for this, on a magma level. A node that checks if a channel exists would be great, or an option that a channel input returns 0 if it doesn’t exist.
Edit: I reworded the topic title with the correct statement of the problem.