Krakatoa Player

Krakatoa for 3ds Max
1

hey i just had an idea, because loading particles and viewing them in realtime can become a problem when they exceed 100k!

how about making a side app, like pdplayer or framecycler, that is geared for viewing particles?

since you would have to render a whole sequence to get the feel for the animation (time consuming just for playblast), and neither realflow max maya or any app can show the particle sequences of huge amounts smoothly or render them quickly…
it would be great to use krakatoas engine to store snapshots, put them in cache and view them in realtime for analysis…

the workflow could be

  1. simulate your particles
  2. partition them in max or just leave them as is
    3)krakplayer would open them (if seperate app, have 3d view, choose one perspective ) and it would render each frame, no effects, no lighting, just the particles as points on white /black background
  3. choose if all particles or every nth particle is shown
    4)put those snapshots as .jpg in temp folder
    5)play them out

stupid idea? :bulb:

2

Nice idea, we already have it, but it is not part of Krakatoa (yet).

We use it in-house to view particles saved on Deadline, check values in particles (you can click a particle and see all its channels and values), display velocities and other data etc.
(Un)fortunately it is not a PRT viewer but a “View Anything” software - it is a 2D image sequence viewer, 3D Mesh data viewer, Flood/Level Set Data viewer and so on. Whether or not it (or a portion of it) will ever make it into any commercial product (it would be quite good as part of Deadline as universal viewer) I cannot speculate.

3

keepin the good stuff for urself :smiling_imp: no just kidding jes then i guess we can hope for this particle viewer to make it at least into deadline or krakatoa package :stuck_out_tongue:

would be a product missing on the market so im sure frantic would benefit with it-- (before autodesk catches on :laughing: )

4

Wouldn’t it just take a smart individual that knows how to write a PRT importer, with some OpenGL and probably SDL knowledge, work as the starting base for one?

5

Yep, that’s the gist of it.

6

that would be awesome :exclamation: