Please download and test Beta 8 of Krakatoa v1.6.0 (a.k.a. 1.5.2.42948).
The major new features and bug fixes are:
*FumeFX 2.0 is now supported by the PRT FumeFX Object.
*New Emission Strength controls have been added to decouple the use of the Emission channel from the Density channel’s influence. The Emission Strength will affect only the Emission channel, thus allowing the Density to go down to 0 for example in order to suppress the Volumetric Smoke from FumeFX while still rendering the Fire as Emission.When set to the same value as the Final Pass Density, the rendering will match previous versions of Krakatoa where the Density affected the Emission.
*PRT FumeFX was causing 3ds Max to hang when a deformation modifier was added. This has been fixed.
*PRT FumeFX and PRT Volume crashed 3ds Max when the viewport Limit was set to 0 and there was a modifier on the stack. This has been fixed.
*Changing the Subdivisions and Count spinners in the PRT FumeFX UI did not cause an update. This has been fixed.
*The saving of the Background particles is now handled by a dedicated “Krakatoa_OccludedLayer” render element. When the existing >Save Multiple Layers option is checked, the Render Element will be added and activated. When the option is unchecked, the element will be turned off (but not deleted). In prior versions, the saving of the background particle layer was performed by internal code and was thus limited to OpenEXR only. Now the output can be any file format supported by 3ds Max.
*Matte Objects with large faces crossing the image plane would cause holes in the Z-Depth data due to some vertices being behind the camera. This has been addressed by clipping all faces by the 6 sides of the view frustum to allow for correct rasterization of the visible portion.
*An empty PRT Loader, or one using Blank before/after Custom Range behavior, or loading an invalid particle file, would cause excessive memory allocation. This has been fixed.
*The Particle Data Viewer was not updating the top list in Manual mode. This has been fixed.
*The >Interactive Mode (SLOW!) option in KCMs UI was not detecting dependencies on Connected Tracks using the new List controllers approach (the same code in the MagmaFlow Editor was working ok). This has been fixed.
*Added a “FumeFX Channels Only” filter mode to Input and Output nodes’ channel list sorting options to make MagmaFlow editing of FumeFX data easier.
*Copying and Pasting nodes between KCMs caused most input nodes to stop working due to the second (Available) track of the source being copied as second controller in the target List Controller. This has been fixed.
*The MagmaFlow right-click menu hit testing precision was off in XP/Vista/Win7 as it was hard-coded for the Windows Classic (Win2K) theme. This has been fixed by querying the height of the dialog’s border, title bar and menu to produce better mouse position in Helium control space regardless of the Windows theme used.
*The redrawing of the expanded Depot in MagmaFlow had issues with the pan offset when switching between modifiers. This has been fixed.
*Under some circumstances, orphaned orange “Node” nodes could appear in the MagmaFlow due to incorrect Depot redrawing calls. This has been fixed.
*Added “Test Renderable State” mode to all PRT object Explorers which displays OK or a reason why a PRT Loader, Volume or FumeFX object wouldn’t render.
*When Krakatoa is assigned as a new renderer directly via the Render Scene Dialog’s controls, the Krakatoa GUI will now open automatically.
*When “Save Compressed” is checked in the Customize>Preferences>Files dialog in 3ds Max 2010 and higher 64 bit, Render Presets could save incorrectly (Autodesk bug). In these cases, the Krakatoa MacroScripts will switch to using a memory slot for storing the last renderer settings. Note that this does NOT store Render Elements though!
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Cool