Is this a Demo Limitation? or a problem in my setup

Krakatoa for CINEMA 4D
1

Hi everyone,

I am importing a prt sequence using Prt Loader, I set up the lights cameras and everything, when I render in picture viewer it looks like I want it,
But when I export the png sequence there is only a few particles, 90% of the particles don’t render.

I am wondering if this is a limitation of the demo or a setting?

thanks

2

There is no such thing as a demo of Krakatoa C4D. If you have an evaluation license, it will be time-limited, but otherwise the same as a full production license.

The most often encountered problem that C4D users seem to report is the difference between the Viewport and the Picture Viewer.

We generally recommend always rendering to Picture Viewer because Krakatoa is heavily dependent on the output resolution, and the Viewport never matches the final resolution. Also, the Gamma (Color Correction) settings of the Viewport and the Picture Viewer are usually different. Just because you don’t see all particles in the rendered image does not mean they were not rendered - they might be just too dark/faint to see.

Can you attach a screenshot of what you see in the Viewport, and the rendered image?

Also, the exact number of particles rendered can be seen in the Script Console window - Krakatoa reports the precise numbers of particles, channels allocated, how long it took to render etc. Does it list the same amount when you render to the Viewport and in the Picture Viewer?

3

It sounds that it is hard to match the picture viewer to the viewport, So instead of trying to fix it i’ll do it again, rendering to picture viewer this time.
But in theory I can get it to look like the viewport or even better, right? Is was beginning to look good :slight_smile:

thanks bobo

4

Yes, you can :slight_smile:

Here is some basic ground rules:

  • When rendering in Krakatoa, try to keep the per-particle density value low so you don’t see individual particles, but each pixel gets a few particles that accumulate together. This is covered in this (KMX) document:
    thinkboxsoftware.com/krak-fi … ainy-look/

  • When you increase the image resolution, you need more particles to cover the increased number of pixels.

  • Increasing the image resolution does not directly affect the render time. However, due to the previous rule, increasing the particle count increases render times in linear fashion, so it kinda does indirectly…

  • When you add more particles, you have to decrease the density by approximately the same factor to preserve the general appearance. For example, if you add 10 times more particles, you need to reduce the Final Pass Density Exponent by 1 (10x less Density).

  • The same applies to reducing the number of particles - as illustrated in the “Fighting The Grainy Look” topic above, to speed up the testing, you can reduce the image resolution to half or quarter of the final resolution, reduce the particles count 10x, and increase the Density 10x to preserve the final density of the image. The test image will have very similar look, but render about 10x faster. Good for look development.

  • Color Correction / Gamma can make particles that are otherwise invisible become very visible. Krakatoa however renders internally High Dynamic Range values with unclamped color channels, and we recommend saving to OpenEXR to preserve the unmodified color values. Color Correction should be applied in post (if possible not in AfterEffects which is notoriously out of touch with HDR imagery - Nuke and Fusion are much better, and Fusion is free now). So we recommend disabling any color correction in the Picture Viewer to get a clearer idea what the output data looks like.