I was surprised to see the Krak atmosphere get a little love in the siggraph video - as I didn’t know it existed nor can I find anything in the documentation on it. Did I overlook something? Benefits?
Most users will see the benefit as having Krakatoa rendering of points available in some form for non-Krakatoa renderers (that use the 3ds max atmospherics). So this means you can get Krakatoa renders in vray or brazil or whatnot. Definitely worth the cost of subscription right there for most users.
It isn’t pixel-perfect to any of the other Krakatoa rendering modes, as it’s a raymarcher using Krakatoa data/channels. However, we’ve asked that the raymarching be adapted to a 4th mode of Krakatoa rendering (compared to Point, Voxel [half-angle], and PRT File). It would also be possible to enhance the raymarcher once it is allowed to operate outside of the confines of the atmospheric system (and we want it for SR anyway). Might also be interesting to make a hybrid raymarcher where the data from the particles is sampled to a grid after lighting, so we could get something the interpolates nicely for sparse particle systems, but renders very fast with complex lighting setups.
It should be faster and “more stable” than the Voxel half-angle render mode now, anyway, which is a good thing, too. The half-angle is too sensitive to changes in the camera or light positioning to be useful unless the sample rate is super fine, and then the speed is horrible, especially when you have many lights, and the complexity scales linearly with the number of lights. The raymarcher doesn’t have these issues, and with the potential hybrid lighting might actually be the fastest (effective) rendering mode.
This is because it wasn’t ready for testing in the first Beta build.
We added it about 10 days before Siggraph and still have lots of work to do on it, but it was a nice demo subject for our presentations.
Otherwise, what Chad said 