*This is the final Release Candidate of the Krakatoa MX 2.3.1 with 3ds Max 2015 support.
It contains some bug fixes and changes related to integration with the recently released Stoke MX 2.0.
[size=200]What’s New since the April 30th build:[/size]
[size=150]New Features[/size]
- PRT FumeFX now handles out-of-range files, so no errors should be caused by modifiers.
- The InputField Magma node previously available in Stoke and Genome is now available in Krakatoa Magma. Note that the direct override by a file sequence has been removed, you can pick any valid Field source including all Stoke Fields and FumeFX.
- Stoke PRT Field source is now a valid input for the Krakatoa Particle Data Viewer.
- Krakatoa Magma now includes the Stoke “NormalizedAge” channel as a preset channel in addition to “Age”.
- The PRT Loader now supports RealFlow .RPC files, as well as LiDAR .LAS files.
- Added support for Thinking Particles 6.
- The Thinking Particles “Expert Mode” is now exposed in the Krakatoa System Preferences rollout. Note that this is not a toggle, but an action button which calls a function to enable the mode for the current session. The TP Expert Mode might allow Krakatoa to work with newer Beta builds of Thinking Particles that is wasn’t compiled against. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!
[size=150]Bug Fixes[/size]
- PRT Hair support for 3ds Max Hair & Fur has broken in the previous build because we did not have the Hair SDK from Autodesk. This is now fixed.
- Krakatoa saving particles with Lighting->Emission now correctly saves all requested channels (not just those requested by the renderer). In the past, if you had added for example the Velocity channel to the list of channels to save, and enabled the Illuminate Particles option to generate Lighting into Emission, the Velocity would end up as 0,0,0 in the PRT file unless Motion Blur was enabled. Now, the explicitly requested channels will be saved correctly to the PRT file as expected.
- Krakatoa voxel renderer no longer complains when render elements suggest float16 channels.
- Matte Objects with Visibility of 0 will no longer occlude particles.
- The PRT Loader now rounds up when loading a percentage, so that we end up with 1 particle instead of 0 particles for small counts.
- VolSelect modifier was broken recently. It now creates a valid Selection channel again.
- PRT Cloner was sometimes producing a rank 0 matrix that was confusing the Particle Data Viewer. This has been fixed.
- Deformation modifiers could potentially kill particle rendering. This has been fixed.
[size=150]Licensing Changes[/size]
- The PRTLoader’s IParticleObjectExt support no longer consumes a license; it merely requires a valid workstation license to be accessible. In the past, if you used a PRT Loader as source of a 3rd party plugin (say, FumeFX) via the standard 3ds Max particles interface, the PRT Loader was using up a render license on Deadline. In other words, you could not use PRT Loaders on all render nodes, only on those that could get a valid Krakatoa-Render license. With this change, PRT Loaders will only check that you purchased a Krakatoa MX workstation license by checking the license server, but not acquiring a license from it. This will allow an unlimited number of PRT Loaders to run on the network when not using the Krakatoa renderer. A render license will be consumed only if Krakatoa is the current renderer.
- The PRT Cloner Repopulation feature used to consume a render license, too. It has been changed to only check for a valid Krakatoa MX Workstation license on the license server.
- The advanced Particle Flow operators - Krakatoa Geometry Lookup, Krakatoa Geometry Test, Krakatoa Collision - used to consume a render license, too. They have also be changed to only check for the existence of a valid Krakatoa MX Workstation license.
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