I’m doing some automation stuff for particle passes where I want to cook a lot of variations out as prt sequences. Partitioning is perfect for it and I’ve gotten a few simple automation loops to turn various pflow systems on and off. Thanks to one of bobo’s earlier responses I’ve got all my krakatoa options and file name outputs all set but I’m not sure of how you’d set off a partitioning task whether local or submitted to deadline. Kind of the equivalent of the render() command but something that’ll instead take my scene and put out 10 partitions for that.
I can’t find anything in the “show FranticParticleRenderMXS” output specific to partitioning, is it more so that krakatoa doesn’t have anything built in as such, it’s just storing the initial pflow position seed value and then looping over the position seed and output name for each cache before restoring the original values? Actually that’ll work either way, I’ll try that first
None of it is explicitly exposed to 3rd parties to perform MAXScript-only partitioning, it is all part of the rollout’s code. But you can of course copy&paste whatever you need from it to get your own partitioning script working.
You are right that the main functionality of that code is to increment and decrement random seeds of PFlow operators, and all other supported systems and modifiers. It also sets the save file name to the correct partition pattern - the FranticParticles interface has a function FranticParticles.MakePartitionFilename() for that. The script then registers #preRenderFrame and #postRenderFrame callbacks to track the timing of each frame for updating the UI, and calls ‘max quick render’ to save the partition sequence in one go.
The same rollout also contains the Deadline submission code, and the file “KrakatoaPartitionTasksOnDeadline.ms” contains a copy of the main partitioning loop that you might want to extract to use in your script anyway…
Take a look and let me know if you need any clarification…
That’s a tonne of things to chase - since my particle counts aren’t huge I might run this as a local process so thank you for the tip on MakePartitionFilename() - that’ll be handy to keep my names prt friendly. Seems like that’ll do for this weekends deliveries and I’ll integrate the full deadline partition tasks after so it’s a more complete utility for whoever uses it next.
