[size=150]Magma 2[/size]
*UPD: The KCM icon/menu item now apply the MagmaModifier (Magma 2) instead of the old one. The old modifier is still there for backwards compatibility and can be added manually from the Modifiers list of 3ds Max.
*NEW: NearestParticlesAvg operator (to be renamed in next build to a shorter name) lets you sample the average value of channels of neighbor particles. For example you can calculate the average speed of N closest particles, or their Color, or their Position etc. Does not work on the current system yet (in other words you need two separate particle systems, one as source of channels, the one with the modifier as the target).
*NEW: Modulo operator
*NEW: Color swatches and Texture map preview options in InputVector and InputTexmap nodes (see View menu)
*NEW: Added options to show the node name and value at input sockets (see View menu)
*NEW: Default values now have user-definable type. E.g. for Add, you can select whether the second empty input socket’s default value is a Vector, Float or Int depending on what the first socket requires.
*NEW: You can now insert an unconnected node into an existing wire by selecting the wire, Ctrl+selecting the free node and hitting SPACE BAR.
*UPD: InputTexmap now supports both explicit and implicit inputs. Explicit can be provided by optional input sockets. Implicit work like in Magma 1.x using the incoming channels of the current object.
*UPD: Almost all aspects of existing KMF (MagmaFlow 1.x) files should now import correctly, including all operators, nested BLOPs, Exposed inputs etc. Only limitation right now is that the InputGeometry in Magma 2 supports just one scene node (scheduled to be fixed later), so importing a Geometry Input from KMF will not import all object references.
*UPD: Improved MagmaScript output to exclude internal properties not relevant to the flow rebuilding (e.g. sorting options etc.).
*UPD: Output Nodes can now be disabled like any other node. This will suppress their whole flow and produce no output channel data.
*UPD: Noise operators now have a Normalize option to output in the range -1 to +1.
*UPD: GeoQuery now supports a channel named Position to get the position from an indexed face and barycoords.
*UPD: InputGeometry has a new output socket to get the Vertex Count.
*UPD: InputParticles has a new output socket to get the Particle Count.
*UPD: Elbow node is now circular in shape.
*FIX: The Magma Debugger wasn’t passing all channels correctly, producing errors. It should work now. If not, it will show the actual MXS error message instead of “???”. Note that it still shows only the first 100 particles, controls to define the range TBD.
*FIX: SHIFT+Drag in MagmaFlow now disconnects all the node’s inputs and outputs, and preserves the highest connected sockets wire regardless of index. (so if input 2 was connected and input 1 wasn’t, the Input 2 wire will be preserved)
*FIX: The Exposed Controls will now be updated correctly when deleting a node, selecting Update… from the Exposure menu, or entering notes (Notes are once again available as tooltips of spinner arrows)
*FIX: Socket defaults will now be preserved when switching the Node Type. E.g. a Greater operator with second socket default of 42.0 will keep that value if switched to GreaterOrEqual. It used to lose it.
*FIX: Highlighting Errors was half-working previously, now it should be fixed by forcing a redraw of the viewport to trigger a re-evaluation of the flow. First Output node never highlighted errors, also fixed.
[size=150]Krakatoa Atmospheric Effect[/size]
*FIX: Density Scaling was broken, producing wrong results. Rendering with Self-Illumination did not work right and so on.
[size=150]Krakatoa GUI[/size]
*NEW: New Main Controls buttons for PRT Hair, PRT Creator and PRT Source added to the block of source buttons. Also updated the VFB extensions and the Schematic Flow.
*NEW: Added Bilinear Filter 2, Bilinear Filter 4 and Bilinear Filter 8 (instead of the previous Bilinear Wide which used a Filter of 2). In theory, specifying the property as “BilinearX” will use X as the filter size. We feel 2,4 and 8 are all you need, let us know if that’s not the case. Expanding the UI is easy. No filtering for Bicubic yet.
*NEW: Option to export to Krakatoa SR. This is WIP and requires access to KSR which is not available yet. Ignore. Same applies to the Preferences dialog which has some controls that are hooked up and some that are not.
*FIX: Fixed the “Add All Partition Sequences” menu option in PRT Loader. It was broken before, now it adds all future Partitions set up in the Save Particles and Partitioning rollouts even before they have been actually saved. This allows you to send Partitioning Jobs (One Job Per Partition) and make a render job with a PRT Loader listing all future partitions to Deadline and make the latter frame-dependent on the former. Thus, when a frame has completely saved all partitions, the corresponding render task can render it.
*FIX: Fixed the default of King Kong Shader’s Diffuse value to be 100.0 instead of 0.0.
*UPD: Changed the wording of the Switch To/From dialogs and formatted them better. Also reformatted most of the Tooltip in the GUI to make them easier to read, mostly via new lines.
[size=150]PRT Objects[/size]
*NEW: PRT Hair now has a Density Falloff spinner which controls the exponent of the falloff. 0 is constant, 1 is linear, all other values produce exponential curves. See Krakatoa SR Video 1 for details: thinkboxsoftware.com/news/20 … art-1.html
*UPD: The Random Seed of PRT Volume can now be keyframed. This is useful when generating Jittered particles in a volume like a Frosted RealFlow to produce foam-like noise.
*FIX: FumeFX stream should now support FumeFX with no Smoke or Fire.
*FIX: Parameters of PRT Creator have been fixed (except for Icon Size which has no effect due to lack of icon)
[size=150]Particle Data Viewer[/size]
*NEW: Added >> before the names of channels in PRT Loaders if the channel is not coming from the file stream. For example, if you load a PRT sequence with Position, Velocity and ID, the PDV will also show Color and Density taken from the loader’s defaults (wirecolor and 1.0, respectively). These two channels will have >> next to their name so you know they did not come from the file. Same applies to channels created with KCMs on the stack.
[size=150]MAXScript Interface[/size]
*NEW: New method in FranticParticles interface:
FranticParticles.SaveParticleObjectsToFile Nodes Filename Channels
This saves the specified node(s) to the given PRT filename. The third argument should be the channels definition, but for now you should pass an empty array #() to save all channels found in the source streams. In future builds you will be able to specify which channels exactly you want saved.
[size=150]Rendering[/size]
*UPD: Rendering in Force Additive mode now skips the Sorting phase since A+B = B+A and the order of drawing does not matter. This speeds up pure additive rendering significantly.
*UPD: The overall rendering performance, esp. with billions of particles, has been improved by approx. 20% (up to 37% in some CPU configurations) by moving a portion of the code responsible for checking for invalid colors to the Drawing loop and optimizing the code used to reset the Lighting channel before lighting the particles.
*FIX: Rendering over 4 billion particles was previously impossible due to an unfortunate 32 bit int cast. This has been fixed, 7+ billion rendered successfully. More to come.