Preparation is not multithreaded...

A portion of the “Preparing” is single threaded.
Please open this file and render in the Picture Viewer.
The Preparation only uses 1 thread for about 1 minute and 49 seconds.
Then draws instantly.

For the record, all my tests are made on a MacPro OS X 10.8.5
20GB Ram.
Cloudoid 01A.c4d.zip (35.3 KB)

The process of setting up the internal voxel subdivision is only using one thread, I am not sure if this plugin or krakatoa related…

being one of the most (if not THE most) computational intensive processes, will it be addressed, or is this a known limitation?

The Krakatoa Mesh Source (a.k.a. PRT Volume) level set conversion code is the only part of Krakatoa that is currently single-threaded for various historical reasons. (it is the same in Krakatoa MX, MY and SR). We don’t feel the amount of work involved in multi-threading that part would pay off enough in terms of performance, but it is on our list of things to do in the future. But this is not C4D specific.

The scene crashes C4D with Out Of Memory on my machine, but I am running a newer build, so it might be something else…

Btw, if you have a mesh that is not very detailed, instead of reducing the Spacing value which causes heavy ray-tracing to capture fine detail, we recommend you increase the Subdivisions value which splits each voxel into sub-regions. A subdivision of 1 means one voxel becomes 8. A value of 2 produces 3x3x3=27 sub-regions etc. This subdivision does NOT involve raytracing since the level set is already created using the larger Spacing value, and then one or more particles are created in the sub-regions IF they are inside the level set implicit surface. Also, the Density of the particles in voxels split by the surface is set to lower values to produce some anti-aliasing that Subdivision of 0 would not produce.

So if your mesh is 500 cm large and a Spacing of 10 cm can capture all major details of the surface, but you want a Spacing of 5 cm, it is better and MUCH faster to set Subdivisions to 1 instead of Spacing to 5 cm.

NOTE that in the current Beta 1 build, the Spacing is in METERS, so 10 cm would be entered as 0.1. We are fixing this for Beta 2 as Krakatoa has no units and anything that comes from C4D should work in generic units no matter what. My build here shows Centimeters now for Spacing.