new Krakatoa renders a little less parts?

Deprecated Krakatoa 1.0 Beta Discussion
1

I am noticing that the new version of Krakatoa seems to render a little less parts than the last version.



I had a file that under the last build saved out a cache with no probs, rendered it with new version of Krakatao, and I got bad allocation errors, it took about 10 thousand less parts to get it to render.





I have not thoughrly tested this, but just thought I would bring it up.





cheers


2

I am noticing that the new

version of Krakatoa seems to

render a little less parts

than the last version.





This version introduced a new Normals channel which allows us to shade specular highlights (for now only of particles from geometry vertices, in the future hopefully for ANY particles). I would guess that this additional channel causes the higher memory footprint per particle and thus less total renderable particles.



In future versions (possibly post 1.0), user channels will be customizable, so you would be able to add and remove them to leverage all your RAM. At the moment, the normals channel is there and cannot be removed from the memory stream (although you can toggle off its saving and loading if you want, I am pretty sure that the memory usage is always affected by it at the moment)



Time to switch to 64 bit I guess ;o)



Cheers,



Borislav “Bobo” Petrov

Technical Director 3D VFX

Frantic Films Winnipeg

3

Can we use that channel now for particles, if we stuff the channel ourselves? Or is it private?

4

Can we use that channel now

for particles, if we stuff the

channel ourselves? Or is it

private?



For now, it is an optional channel in the PRT file and is temporarily hard-coded in the internal particle stream. In the future, it should be possible to add/remove such user channels in Krakatoa.



I don’t think you can stuff anything into it yet. Right now, we are stuffing the vertex normals into it when saving/rendering particles from geometry. It was the first step on the way to implement specular shading. In later builds, it will also be stuffed with normals from particles, but this is still TBD.



I could imagine allowing you in the future to stuff it from PFlow using a Data Operator, Script Operator and possibly a dedicated Normals Operator, but this is not my area, so I will wait for Mark & Co. to comment.



Also, there is a bug logged against specular highlights, they are blended incorrectly with the diffuse color (I am sure you have noticed).



Cheers,



Borislav “Bobo” Petrov

Technical Director 3D VFX

Frantic Films Winnipeg

5

Hehe… No, I’ve been “rolling my own” with Box3, which is why I was asking about stuffing with custom data.