Heya Folks!
for the avalanche bits I’m doing at the moment (which currently suck) I’m working on the solid leading edge of the avalanche and a fluid sim seems the best way to do this. I’ve tried glu3d and while its integration with pflow is really useful, it’s a very slow solver on more detailed or larger sims. Realflow is a lot quicker but doesn’t have the same links. The krakatoa loader thus seemed like a very handy way to link rf and pflow but I haven’t had much luck getting it to work. Any time I choose my particles .bin files, I get an error saying
“prt_file_header.read_header: the input stream:‘filename here’ did not contain the .prt file magic number 727905342139289792”
Any thoughts?
The Krakatoa Birth and Position PFlow operators are currently in the middle of refactoring - it is not obvious from the GUI, but the internals are being rewritten. For example, Link To Object TM does not link to an external node anymore but takes the TM from the PFlow Emitter Icon. I assume the BIN file support is broken right now, will try to investigate and see what is going on.
Have you tried loading in the PRT Loader instead (just to see if that still works)?
We will escalate this problem to a higher priority if it is stopping you from doing your work.
Cheers,
Borislav “Bobo” Petrov
Technical Director 3D VFX
Frantic Films Winnipeg
Could you send us a very simple sample file from RealFlow so we can test with the data you are using?
We have files here, but feel it would be safer to use real-world data to make sure we are addressing your problem correctly.
Thanks in advance.
Sure no problem - the prt loader happily took the file but nothing came in and it didn’t report a particle count. I’ll send you the first few frames of the file since the bins are quite big.
Okay theres a zip file up at http://meltedsnow.net/temp/for_frantic.zip - it’s got the prt loader in the scene and the error message I was getting is repeatable by making a pf source, changing the birth op for a krakatoa file loader and browsing to the sequence.
Maybe I’m not using the prt loader correctly but it doesn’t seem to display any particles or pick up the count correctly.
The files were made from a trial version of realflow 4, we also tried a realflow 3 sim and got the same error.
Cheers,
John
Got them, thanks.
Support for BIN files seems to have been broken during the refactoring of the particle streams in Beta 12.
You might want to try out of curiosity Build 10 or 8 and see if they would still load. You could process the particles in PFlow, save PRT files from the old Beta and load as PRT in Beta 13 if you need the new features…
In fact, you could probably just copy the Particle operators DLL from the old build and use Beta 13 for the rest. I will see if I can test an old PFlow Operators DLL here and if it works, I will send you one for the mean time…
[EDIT]: Tested an old Birth operator, it does not show the error and claims to be loading particles, but does not show them. So it might be an issue with RF4 files.
Also, please always add an _ between the file name and the frame counter, because there is a chance Krakatoa would read Bla100001 as frame 100001 and not as 0001…
Okay - I’ll run an rf3 sim just to test it but I think I loaded in what should have been an rf3 sim. I’ll confirm this one.
Good news - we did some fixes this morning and now the PRT Loader is showing the content from your file sequence. (looks like a long box of particles rotated about its longest axis at 45 degrees - I hope this is correct…)
We will rebuild and test the PFlow operators next. If that fix repaired them, too, I will send you an updated set of Krakatoa PFlow Operators so you can keep on working.
The loaders are supposed to recognize RF3 and RF4 files and use the correct layout for each. If you can still send us some RF3 files for testing, it would be really cool…
Cheers,
Borislav “Bobo” Petrov
Technical Director 3D VFX
Frantic Films Winnipeg
Excellent - it’ll give me faster results than using glu3d it seems - unless you need some flood testers 
Here is the updated DLO for Max 9 32 bit. If you need a different version (Max 9 64, Max 8), we will have to do a full rebuild.
There are two ways to use these:
*Create a regular Birth, create as many particles as you want and add a Krakatoa Position which will place the particles according to the BIN data.
*Create a Krakatoa Birth and select a file with the highest number of particles in the sim (NOT frame 0!), then add the Krakatoa Position and apply Positions and Velocities.
Cheers,
Borislav “Bobo” Petrov
Technical Director 3D VFX
Frantic Films Winnipeg
I’m mainly using max 8 here since thinking particles isn’t updated yet but I’ll give this a go under 9 (I haven’t needed to update for anything yet and I’m sketchy about 9 still). The ad I’m working on is a 5 week schedule, do you think there’ll be another full build for 8 in that time?
Thanks for taking a look!
John
Yup - the new loader works fine and shows me that my sim sucks 
I presume that it’d be fine to almost use max 9 as a filter for realflow files to make prt files from and load them back into 8 for rendering with full matte objects?
When I said full build, I meant yesterday only. We build all versions automatically every night on Deadline, so in the morning we have the latest builds ready to go.
I am attaching the PFlow Operators for Max 8.
Please test and see if they work like the Max 9 ones.
If not, you can keep on using both Max 8 and 9 via PRT…
Are those .bin files RF4 or RF3? We can’t get RF4 files to work with either the PRT loaders or the PFlow operators.
- Chad
Oops. Yeah, it was looking for frame 100000.
- Chad
RF BIN files always write 5 digits, so RF ASSUMES (read:“Makes an ASS of U and ME”) that the last 5 characters are digits, thus a name like Box0100000.bin will read correctly into Realflow, but Krakatoa thinks that ANY digits in the end are frame numbers.
RealFlow itself reads incorrectly if you pass it a BIN file with 4 or less digits like Box01_0000.bin. We added measures to the next Krakatoa build (which I HOPE will be out today or tomorrow) to write 5 digits when writing BIN files, but when creating files from RealFlow, you will have to make sure you add an _ between the name and the frame counter…
Cheers,
Bobo