Added a Global Percentage spinner allowing to load only a portion of all particles scheduled to be rendered. [4114]
Moved the Save Particles To File Sequence controls to a separate Save Particles rollout. Removed the Simple/Advance modes, all controls will be visible all the time. When Render Scene Particles is selected, the rollout will close automatically. When Save Particles... is selected, the rollout will expand automatically.
Added options to the Preferences Rollout to customize the highlight color of checkbuttons per rollout (this can ease the learning curve by allowing the user to color-code various areas of the GUI for faster sub-conscious recognition). The current settings are stored in the Krakatoa.ini file and are NOT saved with the scene. Settings can also be stored in preset files. The new options are:
>Use Custom Checkbutton Colors - enables the use of custom colors
Update Colors Now (Restart GUI) - updates the Krakatoa GUI to use the new color settings
Rollouts drop-down list - allows you to select the group to customize
Checkbutton Highlight Color - a color swatch to adjust the color of the currently selected group.
Save Checkbutton Colors As Preset... - saves the current color settings to a preset file.
Load Checkbutton Colors From Preset... - restores the colors from the preset file.
Changed the >USE LIGHTING button to stay enabled when Additive Density mode is selected. In previous releases it was grayed out in Additive Density mode. Since lighting can have certain influence on the result of additive shading, the option is now available in all modes.
Added an Open Krakatoa Online Help... button to each rollout to open the corresponding page of the online reference.
Increased the cap of the Motion Blur Shutter (degs) spinner to 100000.
Added a Net Render Using Backburner option to the Render Button Context menu when Deadline is not detected.
PARTICLE CHANNELS, MEMORY USAGE AND SPEED IMPROVEMENTS
Introduced support for named particle channels in the Renderer. In Version 1.0.x, Krakatoa always reserved 38 bytes per particle when rendering regardless of what channels were needed or available. In the new system, some channels will only be allocated if they are required by a Krakatoa feature:
Velocity channel will only be allocated if >Enable Motion Blur is checked.
Lighting channel will only be allocated if >Use Lighting is checked
Normal channel will only be allocated if both >Use Lighting and >Use Normals are checked.
Color channel will be allocated unless the >Override Particle Colors option is on and set to Custom Particle Color.
If the above features are disabled and color override is enabled, Krakatoa would need only 14 bytes / particle instead of 38, allowing more than twice as many particles to be loaded in the same amount of RAM, and in shorter time.
In addition, the user can now specify the size of the channel (16 or 32 bits per component). Only Position channel is currently hard-coded to 32 bits.
A memory/particle count calculator was added, showing the memory in Megabytes needed for a specified particle count or the number of particles that could fit in a given amount of memory.
Reading of particle files over the network has been accelerated considerably - between 2 and 3 times depending on the number of channels. Reading of particle files from a local disk is up to 20% faster.
PARTICLE LOADER
When set to Load Single Frame Only, the particle files will not be reloaded on every frame. [4423]
Added a drop-down list to the Particle Counts rollout with the following options:
File Availability Graph - in this mode (which is the new default), the PRT Loader will check only the existence of files on disk and NOT the particle count inside, which makes it much faster. For each sequence, a horizontal line will be drawn. Green means that the frame exists, yellow means that the frame exists but another sequence has a missing frame, red means the frame does not exist. The top line in the graph represents the complete loader and will be either green when all frames in all sequences exist, or red when at least one is missing.
Particle Count Graph - this is the old mode which checks the particle counts inside the files and is thus slower.
Increased the limits of the Frame Offset track to -10/+10 million to allow larger and lower values - if a BIN file sequence was saved from RealFlow without adding an underscore to the emitter's name, it would be called something like Circle0100000.bin instead of Circle01_00000.bin. To be able to load such a sequence in a PRT Loader on frame 0, one would need an Offset of 100000 because Krakatoa sees the suffix as frame 0100000.
Fixed a regression which broke the Edit... button. Added support for instanced PRT Loaders so if two or more instances of the same Loader are selected, the Editor will still open.
Extended the File Sequence Manager (Edit... button in PRT Loader) to display all Particle Channels used by the loaded particle sequences. It supports PRT, BIN and CSV files and will show the depth of each channel if available or -- if not used.
Viewport and Render Limits values have been changed to floats. Thus, entering 123.456 in the Limit field will result in exactly 123456 particles being loaded.
Added Preset Buttons to quickly set typical values for the following fields:
Render Percent
Render Limit
Viewport Percent Of Render
Viewport Limit
Added a button to automatically determine the "Limit to Custom Range" start and end frames based on the availability of frames in all loaded sequences.
The new Surf.Threshold option (checkbox and spinner) enables the culling of particles based on their distance to the surface of the culling geometry. [4419]
If the On checkbox is not checked (culling is off), the particles will appear on both sides of the surface.
If the On checkbox is checked but Invert is off, particles will appear on the inside of the surface.
If both On and Invert checkboxes are checked, particles will appear on the outside of the surface.
Normals From Surface option added to the Particle Culling group of controls. When checked, each particle will acquire the normal from the closest culling surface. [4373]
Added a new display option Display Normals which draws the normal vectors in the viewport (if available). The new Scale Normals value can be used to determine the length of the normal vectors in the viewport.
If available, normals will be deformed by modifiers. [4372]
When "On In Viewport" checkbox is unchecked, the PRT Loader used to show an Error state (particles missing). This has been fixed. [4398]
PARTICLE ANALYZER
Added a Presets>> button to the Graph Colors group of controls with two options:
Save Color Preset - saves the current color settings to a preset file
Load Color Preset - loads the color settings from a preset file
Made all options sticky - all settings will be stored in the file KrakatoaParticleAnalyzer.ini and will persist between sessions. To reset to defaults, delete the INI file.
The Analyzer now respects and outputs to HTML the memory usage in bytes per particle used to generate the Memory Limit line.
THINKING PARTICLES SUPPORT
Improved support for Thinking Particles:
The particle channels (Position, Velocity, Scale, Age, LifeSpan, ID) are now accessed directly via the TP SDK and not through the IParticleObjectExt interface. This fixes some issues caused by our previous approach.
Support for TP Groups has been enabled - inclusion / exclusion lists in the Thinking Particles Groups rollout can be used to specify which groups will be visible to Krakatoa.
ORBAZ PFLOW TOOLS BOX #3 SUPPORT
Added options to the Partitioning Rollout to affect Box #3 Sub-Operators' Random Seeds. Separate controls for Geometry, Random, Scalar+Vector and Icon sub-operators are available. "NOSEED" in sub-operator's name can be used to disable specific sub-operators from being affected.
BRAZIL 2 CAMERA SUPPORT
Krakatoa now supports DOF ON, f-stop and Focal Distance from Brazil 2 cameras.
Perspective, Orthographic and Spherical lenses of Brazil 2 cameras are also supported.
WINDOWS VISTA AND 3DS MAX 2008 SUPPORT
When installing Krakatoa on 3ds Max 2008, the 3ds Max 9 plugin will now be used automatically. In the past, the installation failed without adding an entry to the plugin.ini file because there was no Krakatoa plugin folder for that version.
When installing Krakatoa on Windows Vista, the plugin path will be added to the plugin.ini file in the User Profiles folder instead of using the plugin.ini in the 3ds Max root folder.
Krakatoa Icon files will be copied to the #usericons folder for Max 9 and 2008 - the system icons folder cannot be copied to in Windows Vista.
History support was added to all Open and Save dialogs in the Krakatoa and PRT Loader GUIs under Max 2008.
Here is a list of things that are NOT in the current Beta, but are planned to be included before 1.1.0 is released:
New Krakatoa Particle Flow Operators allowing the birth and death of particles based on particle sequences. These will include
an updated File Birth Operator which can load a sequence of particle files and detect the birth and death of particles, marking dying particles in a dedicated channel
a new Test operator to send out particles marked as dead in the dedicated channel
an updated File Position operator for applying velocities and/or positions to particles.
Support for Motion Blur with deforming Matte Objects.
Asset Tracker support for particle file sequences
Color and UV channel support for Thinking Particles (depending on a technical solution from Cebas)
Any details that you feel are important and are easy enough to implement in this short time period. Please post your wishes to the Krakatoa Beta discussion board.