I need to create particles shadow on a matte object. However MAX kept crashing while krakatoa is trying to save the attenuation map. I followed the tutorial and still no luck. I used max9 and max 2009, and the error happened on both.
I also trying to get a soft shadow on the particle and tried by increasing the shadow map resolution, however the shadow created has hard edges which we don’t want.
Anyone know how to solve this issue? Much appreciated, thanks!
Please always post the exact version of Krakatoa, Max version (incl. 32/64 bit) and Windows version (incl. 32/64 bit).
it is krakatoa v1.5.1.38002
max version 9 extension 1 rev3
and 2009 service pack 1
windows xp 64 with service pack 2
I can email you the file if that helps.
Didn’t you email us the file an hour ago?
I answered that email already. The content of the email was practically identical to your post here, so I assume it was you.
I could not reproduce in Max 2010 64 bit on WinXP 64 bit running 1.5.1.38002 and our latest inhouse build.
I will try to run the same scene in Max 2008 to see if it makes any difference.
Waiting for a screenshot of the error message…
yes, that was me who sent you the file. Apparently it only causing problem with older version of max. It’s working fine with max 2010.
Thanks for the help.
There’s another issue that I’m facing atm. The object matte shadow that landed on the particle seems to be a hard edges shadow. Is there anyway to make it soft edges shadow?
I managed to reproduce this in Max 2008 64 bit, reported as bug to the developers.
As for the shadows, rememeber you are blocking light with a solid object that hits each particle individually, or not. So a particle either gets lit because the light can “see” it, or does not get lit because the light is occluded. So there is no “fake” way to smooth this due to the way it is calculated.
A workaround would be to emulate an area light by creating a bunch of lights with almost the same source point, but slightly offset and using a lower multiplier. As result, multiple lights would hit particles that are around the edge of the matte object, producing a kind of soft shadow effect. But this will be of course rather expensive since each light adds about the same processing time as the final drawing pass. Still, it is something that can be easily scripted and given the general speed of Krakatoa, shouldn’t take too long in most cases.
I had Skydome tests with up to 70 lights and several million particles that took just a couple of minutes. You can see a thumbnail if you click on the first screenshot here:
software.primefocusworld.com/sof … een_shots/
We have had some discussion about possible ways to improve shadows in the future, but right now there is not much control over the softness of the shadows.
Another thing you could try is placing multiple lights at the same point but using varying shadow map sizes - this will cause some particles to fall into the more precise higher-res shadows while not in the lower-res ones, thus producing a smooth area. Will see if I can create an example of this…
Just a heads up that this bug turned out to be already fixed in our latest internal builds.
We will provide a beta build with lots of bug fixes incl. this one in the coming weeks.
Obviously, only customers on contract will be able to download the beta build as soon as it comes out, but once we have confirmed it is stable without known bugs, we will release it to the mass public incl. users of the Evaluation mode.