Just wanted to know how you would render something with Stoke? I’m only guessing but it requires Krakatoa?
anything that can render particles out of max should be able to render stoke [including krakatoa]
Thanks that’s good to know. All the examples kind of make you think you need krakatoa to render with stoke. I’m excited to try it out and see how fast it would be compared to the mesher in max or the pflow caching.
Stoke was designed to produce millions of particles with less effort, so rendering in Krakatoa totally makes sense.
In Stoke MX 1.0, your other options are to use
*Thinkbox Frost to replace each particle with a mesh, or blob them all together, and render in a mesh renderer like Scanline, mental ray, VRay etc.
*Import the PRT files generated by Stoke into Particle Flow using the Krakatoa PRT Birth and PRT Update (available for free with the Evaluation version of Krakatoa), and render the PFlow in a mesh renderer like Scanline, mental ray, VRay etc.
In the upcoming Stoke MX 2.0, we will be adding a dedicated PFlow operator that would allow you to directly drive Particle Flow particles using Stoke/Ember data.
But in the end of the day, if you are generating hundreds of million of particles, your only reasonable option might be Krakatoa… 
Thanks for replying with more information Bobo. Please remember that you don’t always need 100K + particles to make something look great. So in those cases this is where you render cool particles with shaders and so on.
While I’m very interested to see where this Stoke product fits I must say making things simpler is better.
Right now what I find interesting about this product it requires some kind of input first. Meaning you need a fumefx simulation or something to drive it. The workflow to me is just another step before I can actually complete a shot for rendering.
So sometimes you just don’t have the time to do the following:
1: fumefx simulation = hours
2: load that sim into stoke
3: make a prt from stoke
4: render with krakatoa or mesh with frost - this also means tweaking Krakatoa because switching the renderer to it doesn’t mean its going to look good. So again another time requirement
5: OR load into pflow use a krakatoa birth and I’m sure this would be really slow with pflow just like fumefx follow
5 might even be more steps but that’s already a lot to think about and remember
Another thing that has been a struggle for smaller companies is the PRT format is something that doesn’t see to work well for remote rendering. Remote render farms like rendercore, rebus, etc… don’t have this native ability to deal with PRTS or now I would imagine just the stoke plugin & kraktoa for that matter. Some of these remote render farms allow you to add plugins for a job or add extra stuff needed but it takes way too much time than it’s worth.
Sometimes it’s just easier to avoid using Thinkbox products because of all the steps required to get an output. Now this is just coming from the point of view outside of the feature film community. When you don’t have months to work on things when you have a few days or only two weeks for a job. Lots of times I’d like to use Krakatoa and other products but to be honest the time just isn’t there for it.
to clarify, you dont require a fumefx simulation.
let me put it another way - in nuke/fusion/AE you can use existing elements [plates, video etc] and add effects, warp/morph, colour, composite/mix etc etc, but you can also use the tools within the compositing engine to create elements from simple noise functions, gradients etc.
stoke is similar to this in that you can mix, resample, warp, blend and effect particles with other particles. you can even create a noise field with a script or magma [i can’t recall exactly how bobo does it] and pass particles through it. you can use the simplest spray object in max and use stoke to create contemporary quality effects with something as simple as a few spacewarps and a few hundred particles. bobo has a nice demo with the legacy tools to create a fire element for example…but there are many many more.
to put it another way, Stoke allows you to use simple [even bad] elements, or high quality elements you used on another show and ‘finish’ them.
this is MUCH faster than building a new simulation from scratch. i realise learning new software is annoying and takes time - but stoke [and more so stoke 2] takes the idea of simulation data, or particles or volumes and melds it with the flexibility and speed of compositing.
i dont want to write a journal, but i hear yah re: absolutely needing krakatoa, and we’re listening…we arent trying to create a walled garden - quite the opposite fwiw.
cb