[size=150]What Is Krakatoa VRY?[/size]
Krakatoa VRY is a V-Ray Plugin designed to integrate Krakatoa Volumetric Particle Rendering within the Chaos Group V-Ray renderer.
[size=150]What Is Krakatoa VRY Not?[/size]
Krakatoa VRY is not a new separate product. It is intended to be used as an extension of the existing Krakatoa products, and is planned to ship as part of the Krakatoa MX 3.0 and Krakatoa MY 3.0 major version upgrades. While there is no current integration with CINEMA 4D or Krakatoa SR, it might also happen at a later point in time.
[size=150]What Does Krakatoa VRY Consist Of?[/size]
Krakatoa VRY consists of the V-Ray plugin and an integration script for the respective Krakatoa installation. The current plugin is the same on the same OS platform, in other words, on Windows the same DLL is used by 3ds Max and Maya right now. This might change in the future.
Krakatoa VRY depends on the rest of the Krakatoa components (PRT Loader, other PRT objects, Magma, FranticParticles interface in KMX, etc.) for Krakatoa-specific functionality.
[size=150]How Is Krakatoa VRY Licensed?[/size]
The Krakatoa VRY plugin currently looks for a version 3.0 of the krakatoa-render license. In the release version, a krakatoa workstation license might be supported when invoked from an interactive session of Maya.
[size=150]Why Are We Here?[/size]
This is an early Beta test program initiated before the wider Betas of Krakatoa MX 3.0 and Krakatoa MY 3.0 are announced. A relatively small number of testers will be invited to validate the design and workflows, provide feedback, find the most obvious bugs, and hopefully generate some representative imagery that could be used for the official announcement of the larger-scale Beta program
[size=150]Why Do I Need Krakatoa VRY?[/size]
Probably the main difficulty with integrating Krakatoa in a rendering pipeline is the fact that it produces a particle pass that needs to be composited into the output of another renderer (except when the complete output is rendered in Krakatoa anyway). This is further complicated by the need for particles to interact with the geometry renderer’s environment, for example by casting shadows on scene geometry (due to API limitations, Krakatoa MY 2.x does not even support this, and Krakatoa MX requires a relatively complicated setup using a Krakatoa Shadow Generator and external files).
Krakatoa VRY attempts to make this integration less painful by rendering the Krakatoa pass as part of the V-Ray rendering process. This offers the following major benefits:
- Faster iterations of in-context particle rendering.
- Automatic integration of shadow casting effects (geometry to particles, particles to geometry)
- Less Krakatoa-specific rendering parameters - relevant V-Ray parameters like Camera Motion Blur and DOF settings are taken from the VRay setup.
- Advanced integration effects, including
[list]
[*]Reflections of Krakatoa particles in geometry objects with a reflective V-Ray shader (previously only possible in KMX using the Krakatoa Atmospheric environment effect). - Reflections of geometry objects in Krakatoa particles (previously only supported in Krakatoa MX)
- Refractions of Krakatoa particles seen through geometry objects with a refractive V-Ray shader (previously only possible in KMX using the Krakatoa Atmospheric environment effect).
-
Global Illumination contribution of Krakatoa particles to the scene (previously only possible in KMX using the Krakatoa Atmospheric environment effect).
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[size=150]What Is Not In Krakatoa VRY Yet?[/size]
The Krakatoa In A Raytracer project which produced the Krakatoa VRY plugin was subdivided in multiple stages, with Phase 1’s goal being to match the functionality of the existing Krakatoa 2.6 core while integrating the process within V-Ray. The current Krakatoa VRY prototype covers Phase 1, and some parts of Phase 2 (Advanced Effects incl. Reflections, Refractions and Global Illumination).
However, there are still a few missing pieces of the puzzle which are on the ToDo list, but are not part of the current build yet.
- VRay Render Elements support - the Krakatoa particle rendering does not affect the relevant passes yet (the field-based reflections and GI do).
- Global Illumination contribution from geometry to Krakatoa particles
- Global Illumination contribution from Krakatoa particles to Krakatoa particles
- Deep Compositing (multi-layer transparency and particle volumes handling)
[size=150]Any Other Gotchas?[/size]
- The Krakatoa MX implementation is currently based on exporting the scene as vrscene, modifying the vrscene to include the Krakatoa settings, and rendering using the vray.exe stand-alone renderer shipping with V-Ray RT. This has several benefits like background rendering without locking the main thread of 3ds Max, and very fast headless rendering on Deadline, but is less deeply integrated compared to Krakatoa VRY in Maya.
- The current implementation of secondary ray modification for advanced effects like GI and Reflections/Refractions could be faster.