AWS Thinkbox Discussion Forums

Krakatoa beta 3 is now available

Deprecated Krakatoa MX Beta Builds
#1

Krakatoa beta 3 is now available.

There are several bug fixes and enhancements listed below.  Please focus some testing effort on these areas.  In particular, please hammer on Krakatoa's support of additional viewports (ortho and spot), legacy particle systems, object vertex rendering, and additional light types.

Krakatoa 0.9.3 change log.

Changes made to Krakatoa since beta release 0.9.2 (October 2006)

3404: Default lights are now supported, with the following caveats: (1) when viewport configuration is set to 1 Default Light,  3ds Max uses a direct light situated at the “right shoulder” of the camera.  Zooming out causes issues with the falloff range, so we have substituted an Omni Light for more consistent behavior.  (2) Default lights are intended to provide quick and decent results in a 3ds Max render.  Frantic Films has yet to obtain decent renderings with default lights, and thus we recommend this only for previews and tests.

3401: Krakatoa now supports standard Omni and Spotlights and their Mental Ray versions.  All other lights are ignored by Krakatoa and a warning message is displayed in the listener.

3773: Krakatoa now correctly supports directional lights.

3803: Krakatoa now supports rectangular Spot and Directional lights.

3703: Changes to the selection of Particle Color Controls now behave more consistently with respect to automatically presetting “Use Lighting” and “Post-Divide by Alpha”,

3799: Krakatoa now supports RealFlow .bin files.

3834: Krakatoa now has an option to render object vertices as particles.

3547/3846:  3ds Max legacy particle systems are now supported.

3559:  Krakatoa now correctly renders from orthographic views.

3748:  Krakatoa now renders correctly from spotlight and direct light views.

3625:  Krakatoa now logs additional details of submissions of partitions to Deadline in the listener.  It should be more obvious now that submissions have completed successfully.

3626:  When submitting multiple partitions to Deadline with the time slider at a time late in the animation, you may experience delays while the particle system is recalculated after each random number seed is updated.  Krakatoa now provides a suggestion of which slider time would contain the fewest particles, and thus the best performance.

3648: Krakatoa now works as the Material Editor renderer.  Krakatoa renders the vertices of the sample object using the material's self-illumination. Lighting is disabled for material editor renders. The custom sample object is not currently supported.

3815: Krakatoa now checks for required file names when using “Render Particles from File Sequence” and submitting to Deadline.  This is a “sanity check” and will provide a warning if no filename is specified.

#2

To install:

  1. Download and unzip the installer package.
  2. Double click and run Krakatoa0.9.3.msi to install the Krakatoa program files.
  3. The program will ask you to select the 3ds Max installation in which to add Krakatoa.  Browse to and select 3dsmax.exe.

Optionally, you can insert Krakatoa into other 3ds Max versions on the same machine using the helper application:

  1. Run Start|Programs|Frantic Films|Krakatoa 1.0|Add Krakatoa to 3ds Max to insert Krakatoa into your current 3ds Max application.
  2. The program will ask you to select the 3ds Max installation in which to add Krakatoa.  Browse to and select 3dsmax.exe.

To install a node-locked license:

  1. Submit your computer details (machine name and physical Ethernet address) to me privately at dmarks@franticfilms.com to obtain your beta license.

  2. Launch 3ds Max and open the Rendering dialog box. On the Common tab, scroll down to the Assign Renderer panel, and assign Krakatoa to the Production renderer slot. If no license for Krakatoa has yet been configured, the FLEXlm License Finder will pop up.

  3. Select Specify the License File and click Next.

  4. Click Browse and navigate to your Krakatoa license file.

Server-based Licensing:

  1. Submit your computer details (machine name and physical Ethernet address) to me privately at dmarks@franticfilms.com to obtain your beta license.
  2. Run Start|Programs|Frantic Films|Krakatoa 1.0|License Manager Tools to configure the FlexLM license.

Note that two versions of Krakatoa are currently included:  3ds Max 6/7 and 3ds Max 8. The 3ds Max 8 version supports floating point rendering.  (3ds Max 9, announced at Siggraph 2006, is not supported by the current build of Krakatoa, but is expected soon.)

Please post any comments or questions in the Krakatoa Discussion forum.  Bug reports should be posted to the Krakatoa Bug Report forum.

#3

In beta build 0.9.3, there is a known issue when rendering geometry vertices.

Unless the object is an Editable Poly, or has the Edit Poly modifier at the top of the stack, the Krakatoa renderer will cause an assertion error and possible crash.

This is also true if the Material Editor renderer is set to Krakatoa and the Render Particles are set to All Geometry Vertices.

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