Here’s beta 1 for Krakatoa 2.0! Enjoy!
Feature and bugfix lists will be forthcoming.
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Wow, totally surprised! 
Dude it is not even Friday!
Woot woot
For those that weren’t lucky enough to be at EUE, is there a new features post around or just look at the help file?
I’m sure Bobo is just itching to post a big giant list of features. If not I’ll whip one up tomorrow. He’s far more thorough about this stuff than I am.
Here’s a few things I’m most pumped about:
- Krakatoa Atmospheric for rendering Krakatoa particles as voxels inside other renderers, fully supporting reflections and shadows, and perfect compositing
- PRT Hair! Takes splines and puts particles on them.
- Performance optimizations: Loading prt files should be somewhat faster, especially off of SSDs or FusionIO cards. Even better, partitions are loaded in parallel on multi-core machines to maximize throughput.
That list is by no means exhaustive. Just a small sampling of things we’re cooking up for you.
does this require a new license code?
It appears so, I get eval mode with my current license too.
It requires a new license, even I am running in Eval. mode right now 
Here is another partial list of what is new (remember, this is still WIP):
(I have moved the post to the main Beta Discussion to be better discoverable):
viewtopic.php?f=62&t=5818&p=23245#p23245
would love to see performance comparisons vs 1.6 krak for some voxel renders as well.
cb
Hi Chris,
I just benchmarked it using 8 million particles created from a 100x100x100 box turned into PRT Volume with 1.0 spacing and 1 Subdivision, no Jitter. Rendered with 1.0 Voxel Size, Filter 2 at resolution of 1280x960.
Current Beta 1 took 60.772 seconds vs. 65.291 seconds for v1.6.1.
The rendered result was very different though (with the current Beta being “right” and without artifacts).
So the speed up wasn’t earth-shattering, but the quality has improved a lot.
Please keep in mind that I used my laptop with just two cores/4 threads, so the speed up might be greater on better machines…
would love a test or example scene on the SM machine at Siggraph!
Btw, any of the beta testers coming to Van? would love to ensure you come by our suite for drinks - especially if you give us any cool demo scenes! cb
I intend to run some serious tests with that machine, and running 1.6.1 and 2.0 in parallel at the show is something I would love to do, esp. with 80 partitions in one PRT Loader 
i want to see how many billions of particles we can get in one scene at once, and what that looks like at 4k or 8k 
cb
More tests:
Same as before, but enabled Phong Surface shading which loads Normals, too.
Current Beta 1 took 73.045 seconds vs. 84.940 seconds for v1.6.1 (1.1628x faster)
Enabled Environment Reflections and added an HDR spherical map to Environment Map slot.
Current Beta 1 took 134.687 seconds vs. 176.258 seconds for v1.6.1 (1.3086x faster)
In other words, the more there is to do during rendering, the faster Krakatoa 2.0 performs compared to v1.6.1.
wow loads of new new, awesome indeed! the PRT_creator thing sounds amazing. oh doc baily you and your madness continue on.
Did we sign an NDA along the way? Can we talk publicly about this build?
Most of us did. Didn’t you?
No, you can talk about this on the Beta board, that’s what the Beta board is for.
After Siggraph, you will be able to talk about what we talked about there.
After we release the final product, you can talk about it
Everyone on the Beta Boards should sign an NDA. if you haven’t, thats an error that should be rectified.
Sorry.
Chris Bond
Management of Beta Police
You have throw some cookies to the kids every now and then to keep them doing the pee-pee dance 