one of our artists was just asking the following question which i hereby forward to this forum:
Is there a possibility to include/exclude channels, that will be cached by stoke (i.e. age, lifespan, color, etc.) just like in krakatoa?
if not please consider this a feature request
reason is that we simply often donāt need all the channels and not saving them does decrease saving time, network traffic, loading time, etc. something weāre often doing with Krakatoa setups.
of course, thereās the workaround of going through Krakatoa to achieve this and get rid of all unnecessary channels. but to be able to do this in one step would be pretty helpful.
Currently, PRT files saved by Stoke include the following channels implicitly:
*Position (this is more or less mandatory for PRTs)
*Velocity (needed to interpolate for retiming, motion blur etc.)
*ID (needed for a lot of operations e.g. Load Nth, Delete with Soft Selection etc.)
*Age (needed for post-deleting or coloring by Age)
*LifeSpan (needed for post-deleting or coloring by Age)
Color and Density are NOT saved at all.
Any other channels listed in the Stoke object will be included if acquired (e.g. mapping coords of emitter etc.)
I can see making the Age and LifeSpan optional. Possibly ID and Velocity too. But that would limit your flexibility for post-processing in Magma a lot.
i totally understand your concerns. and there are probably very few cases where it makes sense to not store ID and/or Velocity. but actually, they do exist
he was just telling me that heās doing that often in Krakatoa in cases where he really knows that he wonāt need them later on. so we were just wondering why this ability exitst in Krakatoa but not in Stoke.
to sum it up: would be great to have the same ability in Stoke to switch any individual channel(s) on/off for experienced users. but probably not have them switched off by default
It would be a tremendous help to have a lot more control over what gets saved. Not just in which channels are excluded, but Iād like to save custom magma channels (for example, I normally boil age and lifespan down into one 16 bit ageProgress float to save on disk space and still have decent post process control).
Also, it seems to go with 32 bit depth for everything and Iām not seeing any options to reduce it. Thats fine for position, but seems like overkill for the others.
Iāve been spending quite a bit of time re-baking Stoke caches just to strip out extra data that isnāt needed for rendering (up to 40% smaller file size).
It actually takes longer to rebake the cache than to sim it out in the first place!
I have logged all your requests as a single item and will review them with the developer.
I especially like the idea of a normalized Age/Lifespan channel (we could call it āLifeā), and I hope the ability to save 16 bit instead of 32 for most things like Velocity and Age/Lifespan/Life would be relatively easy to implement.
Jumping back into the Stoke world after taking a hiatusā¦
Big huge tremendous THANK YOU for implementing the channel selections, 16 bit float optimizations, and normalizedAge channel!
It is a major difference to get clean caches with exactly the data I need straight out of Stoke without any reprocessing.
Less disk space/network strainā¦snappier performance for magma tweaks and test rendersā¦Iām loving it!
