Please download and enjoy the third beta build of what is currently known as Krakatoa v1.5.2.
The highlight of this build are:
*New Krakatoa Shadows type in Max Lights - proper shadow casting from particles onto geometry in conjunction with shadows from geometry onto geometry is now possible, including multiple samples (Deep Opacity Maps), colored shadows due to Absorption channel data and so on. We have also added a new Krakatoa Shadows Explorer utility for managing the shadow generation of multiple lights and mass-editing for the settings.
*The Krakatoa GUI has been put on a diet and should launch in less than a second in typical situations (assuming Deadline detection is off or Deadline has been detected already). Lots of changes to the location of some rarely used rollouts have been made to keep only the important ones around.
*Shadow casting from Matte Object onto Voxels has been fixed, Camera Clipping Planes are now supported in Voxel mode and some other bugs were fixed.
[size=150]Shadow Casting In Static Scenes[/size]
We discovered a small problem with Krakatoa shadow maps in the current build. 3ds Max inherited the ability of 3D Studio DOS to skip shadows evaluation in static scenes where the only animated object is a camera. As a side effect of this “smart” system, Krakatoa shadows won’t load on every frame if there are no animated objects in the scene. For example, if you create a plane with some teapots, add a light and a moving camera and create a Particle Flow, render the particles and calculate shadow maps and switch to Scanline to render an animation range, the shadows from the PFlow will not be rendered because nothing in the scene is animated and Scanline will assume the shadows should be generated only on the first frame. This can be solved temporarily by adding two position keyframes on the first and last frame of the scene segment to any geometry or light object. The keyframes can even have the same value, keeping the object static, but will break the validity interval and force Scanline to update the shadows.
This has been fixed in our internal builds and won’t require workarounds in Beta 4.