Attached you will find the first Beta build of what is to become Krakatoa 1.5.
It will require a new license but will run in watermarked mode without a license as usual.
A lot of features are not fully implemented yet and some of those that are implemented need polishing, but it should give you an idea of how the Voxel Rendering works and also let you do some things with Particle rendering that were not possible before.
You will find a list of the features that are new in this Build as well as a long list of things that are known not to work as expected here: franticfilms.com/software/su … _notes.php
The page also links to a couple of new documentation pages discussing the basics of Voxel Rendering, the new Iterative Scale Output option, the Krakatoa Skin Wrap WSM and the improvements in the Krakatoa GUI management.
Santa = 1
Reindeer = 9
Elves = 100
Xmas = (Santa + Reindeer) * Elves
for x = 1 to Xmas do
(
print “Thank you!”
)
Happy Holidays! Hope all of you will get a few days off:)
Just to clarify the word “release”, this is an early Beta and there are lots of things that are planned to be in 1.5 that are currently not there yet. So play with what is in it and stay tuned for more.
Note that we have updated the 1.5 documentation with some more examples of Voxel Rendering, including Volumetric Mapping, Opacity Mapping for Density control and the new Opacity Mapped Matte Objects support.
Surprisingly enough, Voxel Rendering with Opacity Mapped Matte Objects is actually faster than without Matte Objects because less voxels have to be shaded.
Also, rendering 1 million particles in voxels can be equivalent to rendering 10+ million particles as points, in which case Voxel Rendering with Opacity Mapped Matte Objects is actually faster!
The comments about the compositing layers… We’ve hit that wall numerous times, of course. So is that something that’s being addressed, or are you just commenting that it’s still not going to be possible at all in 1.5?
At this point, I don’t know whether this will be addressed correctly in 1.5.
We needed simple b&w matting for a project that used opacity maps and got it in. How exactly we would split an image into layers to allow for correct compositing with semi-transparent mattes would require some research.
Well, the lighting channel in the PRT seems a good step. That way I can clip FG particles from BG particles and still get correct lighting.
Now if you have some sort of interparticle shading operation that would be broken by that, then yeah, that wouldn’t work… You’d need to use all the particles to calculate the shading, just as you would the lighting, only you’d need to save the SHADING as a float16(3) in a PRT. Which might not be so bad for the same reason saving the lighting isn’t a bad idea.
BTW, Chads last post got me excited and while I have had this lasted build installed on my laptop since you released it, I just tried to install in on my workstation and I get a “DLL <install path…\MaxKrakatoa.dlr> failed to initialize. Error code 126 - The specified module cannot be found.” error. Is the installer timebombed or maybe something else? This happens on the 32 and 64 bit installs of max 9-2009
Read the notes about manually copying the TBB.DLL into your Max folder?
(TBB stands for Intel Threading Building Blocks and is the library we use to speed up Krakatoa. in the future, it will be copied automatically.)
Nope, it is needed for both 32 and 64 bit and is not part of the installer yet (we have to figure out how to install in the root of Max, especially under Vista where that is not allowed).
