If you toggle Iterative[Full] down, and then switch to Save Scene Particles the iterative button is disabled but I would expect it to resort to being turned off.
The button is disabled because it is NOT USED in Save Mode. This is to notify the user that when pressing the SAVE PARTICLES button, PRT files will actually be saved to disk and ALL frames will be processed, not just the current one. We don’t uncheck the button to allow the easy switch back to RENDER FRAME mode without having to remember to check the Iterative again.
In other words, Iterative mode in Save Particles mode does nothing and is fully ignored. I could as well hide it
This sounds ideal, and my initial thought of what would happen, but then I came back and only one frame had been saved to disk. I looked into this further to find out what was happening:
Render Scene Particles; Iterative [Full] checked, hit RENDER FRAME. The dropdown in the common tab of the render setup switches to Iterative (automatically) and renders as expected. But now if you switch to Save Particles to File Sequence and it still only saves the current frame b/c the dropdown in common tab is still set to Iterative (wasn’t automatically switched to Production).
When I wrote Iterative support, it was in Max 2008 which does not have its own Iterative option. I thought it was a good idea to set the Iterative option of Max 2009+ if available, but never thought about what the implications would be in saving mode (as it forces Max to render the current frame only independently from Krakatoa).
I will have to think about how to work around this because the Krakatoa Iterative mode is not quite the same as the Max 2009+ Iterative mode.
I think the best solution would be to uncheck Iterative when switching to Save Particles mode. I could remember the last state and restore it when switching back to Render Particles.
