render and save to file

is there a way to save a Kraka disk cache and render at the same time?



if not, would be useful!

Right now, there is obviously no way, but I don’t know of a technical reason preventing us from doing both at the same time.



We will have to discuss this internally though, there might be some reason I am not aware of



Cheers,



Borislav “Bobo” Petrov

Technical Director 3D VFX

Frantic Films Winnipeg

FYI, Your wish was logged as bug 3927.



Borislav “Bobo” Petrov

Technical Director 3D VFX

Frantic Films Winnipeg

We will have to discuss this

internally though, there might

be some reason I am not aware

of



I was right, there WAS a reason not to have both at the same time.



Here is how it works:



*When you render to frame buffer, all particles are loaded into memory, then shadows are calculated, then the particles are shaded.



*When you save to disk, the particles are NOT loaded into memory but the stream is written straight to disk, thus requiring almost no memory.



This means that if you have 2GB of RAM on a 32bit machine and you push PFlow to its limits, you might not have enough memory to actually render the particles, but you can surely SAVE them to PRT since this has no memory overhead. Then you can disable the PFlow, load the PRT and render using the same 2GB of RAM for Krakatoa alone.



Note that we have a bug logged against loading particles in Additive Density mode - right now, the particles are ALWAYS loaded into memory, but since Additive Density does not make any sense to load particles into memory as there is no shadow pass to calculate, it should stream particles, accumulate in the Frame Buffer and discard them just like the Save mode works, thus allowing a lot more additive particles to be shaded with the same amount of memory without saving to PRT.





It would be theoretically possible to save to disk what is being rendered, but you wouldn’t be able to get the same amount saved to PRT as with the pure Save mode, thus we feel it does not make much sense to implement.





Hope this makes sense,



Borislav “Bobo” Petrov

Technical Director 3D VFX

Frantic Films Winnipeg

fair enough, I would rather have more parts rendered.



cheers