As with Beta 1, this build needs the 1.5 license, otherwise will run in evaluation mode (this time with watermark on voxels).
Don’t forget to copy the TBB.DLL into your main Max folder if you haven’t done so for Beta 1.
We have tested it only in 3ds Max 2008 32 and 64 bit, please let us know if it misbehaves in Max 9 or 2009. No build for 2010 yet.
Dude! Just tried it, pretty crazy, so I can export those particles via prt and bring them back into pflow via krakatoa birth, if i understand this correctly?
You can do whatever you want with them, they are just particles. Keep in mind that if you save a sequence, the particles in each PRT frame will be completely unrelated to the particles in the other frames (if that matters), while driving PFlow particles with FumeFX Follow operator keeps the same particles running through the sim. We convert each FumeFX voxel into a particle, so what you get is a form of particle snapshot of the internal FumeFX data. We also read the Velocity, Fuel and Temperature channels and intend to provide a way to remap the latter two to other channels in future builds.
The main reason for this feature was the fact we were unable to render a specific simulation for an AAA summer movie with less than 64GB of RAM and needed to get Krakatoa to work with FumeFX as it has much lower memory requirements. It is still slower than native FumeFX rendering (but this might change in Beta 3) and does not provide all shading capabilities (yet), but feel free to be creative and see if you can find new ways of using FumeFX and Krakatoa together, with or without PFlow. Remember, they are not competing products, but a great team!
Oh, btw there is an undocumented bonus Krakatoa feature somewhere in Max. It was added so I can test it but was not intended for beta yet as it still has some quirks. See if you can find it!
I saw Krakatoa Channels but for the life of me couldn’t directly see how to use it. Swapping channel data is what I gather. My particle apprenticeship seems to fall a little short here… Lots of cool channel info in there though
Nope, that is just the UI of a modifier we haven’t implemented yet internally, but we will need it if we want to let you copy, say, FumeFX data into UV channels and such. I expected you to pick that one, but it is not really a feature yet.
I am thinking Chad is more up for this challenge, he knows this software far better than I do, although I have discovered some more of the many useful features, so maybe all is not lost for me
Discovered a bug in Beta 2 - Scale Density using Material Opacity produces densities 255 times higher than normal due to incorrect color conversion.
This has been fixed for Beta 3.
We will post a new build ASAP with this fixed, plus some additional tweaks - handling of particles with invalid positions and some UI improvements.
See the 1.5 documentation page for details.
I have to admit I wasn’t sure, I have really been concentrating on the box#2 PhysX operators for the last few months, and when I get a extra time to play with Krakatoa it is usually birth to FumeFX follow to prt.
The GeoVolume Modifer == very nice
I like the fact that a single frame GeoVolume to prt + File Birth makes a real nice Birth/Position Object choice, not a replacement just another option also the voxel scalability and the grid consistency of the volume and shell, big plus.
