STOP AND READ!!!
It appears that some of the new features added to support Thinking Particles have added a dependency on the ThinkingParticles.DLO which prevents build 1.1.0.31258 from loading on Max installations without TP installed. If you do not have Thinking Particles 3.0 beta installed on your machine, please don't install this build!It also turned out that our fix to the above problem does not work with the final version of TP 3.0 which was released on March 14th.
We will have to wait for the final version of the 3.0 SDK to figure out what has changed.
NEW IN KRAKATOA 1.1.0.31258
THINKING PARTICLES
- Added support for Renderable Property of TP Groups - instead of storing an explicit exclusion list, Krakatoa will now simply use the Renderable option of each group. The TP Rollout in Krakatoa is a mass-controlling UI for these properties - moving groups between the lists will check their Renderable checkbox. Callbacks will keep an eye on the checkboxes and update the Krakatoa GUI if the TP Rollout is expanded, too.
- This also fixes the bug preventing TP groups from being disabled when moved to the left list.
- Group Hierarchies are now supported at any level. The TP Rollout will show an abbreviated version of the hierarchy, the >Show Full Hierarchy will expand the display to show all parents. Particles will be rendered only if they are in an enabled channel, parent channels will not "see" children's particles like in the previous build, thus fixing the duplicated particles bug.
- Data Channel propagation will be supported - if a Color or Density channel was ADDed to a parent group, all children groups will have that channel and can use it to define local colors. You cannot create a local Color or Density channel if a parent channel exists already, but it does not make any sense to do so anyway - just overwrite the existing channel's values with local color and density settings. Krakatoa will warn you about duplicated Color and Density channels.
- NOTE that if a Color or Density channel is created but not assigned to, it will contain black resp. 0.0 and the particles will render black or invisible. If a Color or Density channel is specified, it has to contain valid data. At least make sure you populate it with a white default color or 1.0 density before attempting to render particles.
- If NO color channel is assigned to particles, they will now respect the Groups' color (in previous builds, the wirecolor of the TP object was used instead). Thus, to make a bunch of particles red, just move them to a group that has its color set to red - no need to define a Color DC unless you want the color to vary per particle...
KRAKATOA GUI
- Fixed a UI typo in the Custom Highlight Colors preferences.