Integration with other render engines

Deprecated Krakatoa 1.0 Beta Discussion
1

Hello all, I have not yet been able to work with Krakatoa as I am awaiting licensing, however in reading the board and documentation I have some questions/observations.   Please forgive me if they have already been addressed/discussed.  Or, if my assumptions are inherently incorrect.

It seems that the Krakaroa render engine does not integrate with other renderers.

For compositing and integration I foresee problems when trying to integrate a Krakatoa element into a scene rendered with Scanline/Brasil/Vray/etc.

I'll refer to Vray as it's been my primary engine of choice for several years now.  If I want to have Krakatoa particles reflect/refract/cast shadows in my scene rendered with Vray, I see no way to achieve it based on what I have read.

Yes, there is or will be a way to cache shadows as image sequences to use in lights to create shadows, but this does not address scenes that do not use conventional max lights that offer that functionality.  As an example, we use Image based lighting almost 100% of the time using the Vray Dome light (we rarely if ever use any other light sources).  There is no place to insert an image sequence, and in the context of the dome light (image based lighting) it would be impossible to do and would make little sense.

So, is it possible to get shadows from Image based lighting methods?  Or is it possible to get particles to reflect/refract in objects that are in teh scene?  I imagine the answer is no based on the current implementation.  I also see problems with matte objects not motion blurring properly as the different renderers create different motion blur sampling.

Now, (correct me if I am wrong here), but  I believe that Afterburn/Fume/Dreamscape use their own "sub-render" engine within the context of the overall scene renderer to render their atmospherics..they kick in when they are rendering their atmospherics.

Is it not possible then to have Krakatoa function in a similar fashion...where it is accessed through the effects/enironment dialogues and works within the construct of the that scanline/brasil/vray/mental ray/etc render engine?

To this layman, it seems that it should be possible as Afterburn/Fume/Dreamscape are able to do this.

Ok...enough rambling for now...thanks for indulging my questions.  :)

 

-Greg Tsadilas

 

2

It is possible to bake lighting into your particles and use that instead of the Krakatoa lighting. I did a test like that to make speculars. Basically using Box3 to calculate the lighting and Krakatoa to rasterize the results. Ambient occlusion would also be possible. Reflection? Well, I suppose you could do it old school and transform the particles relative to the camera and reflecting surface normal. Hmmm…



Oh, I suppose you want particles to be multithreaded, right? Yeah, that part sucks.



As to the atmospherics, we were looking into making a voxel raymarcher ourselves using that interface. It’s not a bad method, but since Krakatoa was originally a standalone, I suspect the idea was that making a render plugin was more straightforward than making an atmospheric. The big question is, will the standalone be for sale at some point?


  • Chad
3

Greg, this is correct, Karaktoa IS a render engine, it does not integrate with others except at Post level.



Since we are a VFX house, we do half of the work in 2D Post. So producing ELEMENTS that can be comped with the rest of the elements which we render using Scanline, Brazil, V-Ray, Mental Ray and Gelato. So far, we had no problem integrating our particle renders with the rest of the scene.



But Krakatoa is not an extension to V-Ray or Brazil, it is its own renderer and is not even at 1.0. If you wait long enough (but shorter than it took Brazil 2 to appear ;)), you might see all your wishes covered.



The main reason to write Krakatoa was to be able to push as many particles through the pipe as possible. We try to stay as far away as possible from Max’ own rendering internals although we use the shading subsystem a bit, but we intend to work on our own.

If Krakatoa does not do what you need it for, then it is simply not what you need. We are using it in production RIGHT NOW though (and in one or another form we used point rendering for over 3 years on feature films like Stay, Cursed and Superman Returns) and we feel it has its niche in the rendering pipeline.



Working in the LIMITS of other people’s renderers wouldn’t allow us to do what we want speed and memory-wise. We cannot even get VRay to play nice with Deadline in some cases and have to wait for month for somebody to look at the problem, imagine if we were dependent on Chaos Group to fix a bug so we can fix a Krakatoa bug :oO



my 2 cents.





Borislav “Bobo” Petrov

Technical Director 3D VFX

Frantic Films Winnipeg

4

Bobo,

I get the impression that you took my post as some type of attack on Krakatoa, or does it just read that way?

I understand about working in a VFX house, I've been doing this for 12 years.  I understand pipelines, I've worked on film, tv, commercials, music videos, etc.  We're all here in this site because of our experience in the industry or because we have something to offer to the group.

As an aside...."Waiting for Chaos to fix a bug", in my experience takes at most a day...at least for us anyway.  We just got a build compiled and sent to us within 1 hour just yesterday.  Vlado is quite responsive in that respect.

All that aside, I understand everything you say.  What I was looking for was to possbly start a discussion.  This is a beta forum, I'm not attacking your work, the questions are valid.  Questions help fuel development, features and shape future products that are in beta.

- Can I reflect particles in objects?

- Can I refract particles in objects?

- Can I get shadows of objects when using image based lighting?

The dismissive answer I got was "well we've been using it for 3 years on this film and that film and If Krakatoa does not do what you need it for then it is simply not what you need."

If a developer was to answer you as such, would you want to deal with them?

Regards

5

Greg,



Sorry, I guess you caught me on the wrong foot, but your post sounded like “I have not used Krakatoa yet, but it does not do what I need”, so I got defensive. My bad.



Once again, if you stay around long enough, chances are you will see all the features you want implemented. But not in 1.0 which is just around the corner.



I will add all your comments to the wishlist/buglist database so they will not be lost.



Peace,



Bobo


6

It’s all good Bobo.







I’m really impressed with what it can do.in seeing the examples on the

forums and in the discussion here it’s kick-ass. A co-worker was walking

past me while I was viewing the volumetric teapot QuickTime and his comments

were “Wow, I love it when a large company like DD has proprietary software

for years, and then it comes out as a plugin from another developer”. He

was referring to DD’s Voxel Bitch. So Krakatoa is already a hit. J







Good to hear I got you early before you had your coffee. And it’s also good

to hear you have not stopped thinking about what needs to be implemented

after the 1.0 release.







Regards







Greg



















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Subject: Integration with other render engines







From: “Borislav Petrov” (bobo@franticfilms.com)



Greg,



Sorry, I guess you caught me on the wrong foot, but your post sounded like

“I have not used Krakatoa yet, but it does not do what I need”, so I got

defensive. My bad.



Once again, if you stay around long enough, chances are you will see all the

features you want implemented. But not in 1.0 which is just around the

corner.



I will add all your comments to the wishlist/buglist database so they will

not be lost.



Peace,



Bobo



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7

Greg, thanks for the positive feedback!



Some random thoughts on your wishes and some other ideas being kicked around:



For Superman Returns, we had to refract millions of particles (designed by the late Doc. Baily) inside of crystals using Brazil and /or Gelato, so we have certain experience with integrating particles with raytracers. Since I am not the senior developer of Krakatoa though (hell, I am not even the junior developer, I only wrote the Scripted GUI layer), I will leave the answer to somebody more qualified.



GI and multiple scattering are on the general plan, but we cannot comment on where on the roadmap these might be. I guess image-based lighting (HDRI and sky domes) falls in this category, but I might be wrong.



Shadow Casting from particles onto scene geometry using default lights is almost there. We will have to finish that first before we look at indirect lighting models.



Photometric lights have been on our wishlist for a while, but we are keeping them back for a point release.



Specular highlights from density gradients are on the plan but for post 1.0 - right now Chad is faking the effect using Box 3, since last build the Particle Orientation can be used to calculate specular shading, so it is much easier now - all you have to do is orient particles along surface normals and the result shades with highlights.



Next build will provide a first step of integration with rendertime displacement from 3rd party renderers (right now we have covered only Gelato, but in the end it will work all renderers) by supporting Initial Depth Maps for particle clipping.



As you can see we are working on improving the integration step by step, but I guess it will take a while before all possible features are covered…



Regards,



Bobo

8

Speaking of which, I’m using Box3 to get the gradient to orient the particles to use the new specular rendering.



Much faster and easier.



However, it would be nice if we could set the diffuse level. Especially if I need to make a specular-only render pass. It’s also more accurate that way, where a surface would return an amount of light not exceeding the amount of light hitting it. :slight_smile: Also, it would be nice to specify the specular color. A swatch would be a enough for 1.0, but at some point accessing a separate per-particle channel would be welcome.


  • Chad