Whew! After promising this to you for nearly a week, we finally have a new build suitable for beta. This build is loaded with important changes and bug fixes, so it took us some time for sanity checks before getting it to you.
You will immediately notice some significant additions to the GUI, so we ask that you hammer on this release and log any bugs you encounter.
(NOTE: This build has increased in size from roughly 4 MB to over 10 MB. This required a change to web server buffer settings, so please alert me if you encounter any difficulties downloading the file or uploading your sample files.)
Summary of changes to 0.9.4:
- 3ds Max 9 is now supported in both 32 and 64-bit versions.
- General organizational changes have been made across the GUI.
- Default lights are no longer supported. The engineers (and artists using the feature) found the results unacceptable.
- Use Lighting is now OFF by default.
- There is now a toggle to use Environment Background Color (default = ON).
- Density can now be decoupled into separate settings for Lighting and Render passes. This alters the shading algorithm so that the results may not be "physically accurate" but provides a great deal of flexibility in refining the look of the rendered particles.
- There is now a Constant Alpha mode available in the Density drop-down lists. This mode may provide more intuitive results when dealing with low particle densities at varying distances. Note that when using Constant Alpha, there are no density scaling options that will affect the rendering. Also, the density and alpha will be clamped at [0,1] regardless of massively high density settings.
- Matte Objects can now be chosen using Named Selection Sets.
- There is a new rollout containing controls for render History and Presets. This provides an automated record-keeping system allowing you to track render versions and compare settings. Although the system is very sophisticated, the controls are fairly self-explanatory. Documentation updates are in progress and will be posted as soon as possible.
- User Notes can now be added in the GUI.
- Assertion errors when rendering All Geometry Vertices are now fixed.
- New Krakatoa-specific Particle Flow operators have been added. Krakatoa Particle Birth and Krakatoa Particle Position will read Krakatoa particle files into a particle system. IMPORTANT: To use these new operators, you will need to augment your beta license. Please contact me by email if you would like a license for this feature.
- Krakatoa now reads Gelato .SDB files and RealFlow .BIN files.
- The Krakatoa: Render Target rollout is for future use. It was inadvertently left in this beta release, but will be removed from the final version.