Is their a way to have direct Script PRt saver for Tp groups without having someone buying krakatoa ?
thanks
The Evaluation version of Krakatoa will happily save PRT files without a license, so the “buying” part is really not a problem. Of course, one has to run the saving locally as network rendering would not be supported by the Eval. copy.
But if you mean “without installing Krakatoa in 3ds Max”, then the answer is “no”.
We want to provide MAXScript access to PRT saving as part of Krakatoa so people could perform saving without seeing the Krakatoa GUI, but it would still require the Krakatoa DLR to work.
Can you explain in some more words the situation so we can answer better?
Thanks.
Yes… thanks Bobo first for the answer…
After talking with Chris Harvey , their is an interest in this Prt Mesher that frantic is developing… The idea is even if we get access to this mesher , we cannot use it as we cannot save prt Data from Thinking particles groups …
I m trying to plan ahead before even officially request\try\access to this mesher to make sure i will be able to Save Data Out in prt format … !
make sence ?
Well, the PRT Mesher can load PRT, CSV (ASCII Comma Separated Values) and RealFlow BIN (3 and 4) files.
But last time I talked to RnD management it was not going out of Frantic since it is part of Flood (I wanted it to be part of Krakatoa, but Mark Wiebe said no).
Obviously, you can save PRT files from TP groups with Krakatoa 1.1 even without a license, so that would be the least problem. The story about getting the PRT Mesher though is something I have no control over…
yes i understand … cool… definintly not an official conversation yet 
thanks
ps: my question still the following : why not allowing a Prt exporter separated … something like a simple script separated from anything else… it looks like the idea is .prt could be a more general format cross platform for the futur things if i m not missunderstanding … just wondering if it would be a good thought to have things like this separated as well just as a script or so …
The idea is valid and we are actually working on something along these lines.
Having a separate PRT saver does not make much sense to us at this point because Krakatoa already covers this in Max (and although we want to sell some licenses, we practically give the PRT saving for free). We are running PRT saving all the time as Krakatoa jobs both locally and on Deadline and I haven’t felt the necessity for a scripted function to do the same.
We have users who have written PRT exporters for XSI, Houdini, writing out of Maya would be rather easy with Python, one company even implemented export from Fusion (it has 3D particles). We could of course implement separate exporters for other applications, but since there is no stand-alone Krakatoa available commercially (yet), it does not make much sense to spend the time writing these. Instead, we published the format and allowed anyone to output to PRT. Some of these people might release their code to the community.
But for Max, right now we allow anyone to output to PRT without paying for a license, which is rather generous IMHO. Creating a redundant MAXScript extension that does just PRT output would be a waste of resources since the code needed to do this is already part of Krakatoa for Max. All we want to do is provide simple MAXScript functions (exposed by Krakatoa’s FranticParticles Interface) to do the saving from the command line instead of using the renderer. But I am not saying we won’t do it, I am just explaining why we haven’t done it so far. 
If you want, you could post a formal wish to the Krakatoa board.
Before we had the PRT spec, we were doing everything with CSV files and scripting. Other than the size/speed, it wasn’t a problem.
We’ve talked about making some standalone PRT tools, too. Like a commandline PRT randomizer that just changes the order of points, or one that takes a large PRT and splits it up into several smaller PRT’s. Once that is in place, making a CSV to PRT converter that you could run as a job in Deadline wouldn’t be hard.
- Chad
Is that PRT Mesher officially NFS?
- Chad
Well, that was the last thing I’ve heard. In the mean time, Mark left Frantic to pursue a PhD at the University of BC, so the new management might have different ideas… Take it with a grain of salt.