Random question … where did the name Krakatoa come from?
Krakatoa was hard to name because a lot of good particle/volumetric related names are already in use by other products out there. This name stuck because it sounds cool, and volcano smoke is one of the things to render with Krakatoa. Here’s some images of how (the volcano) Krakatoa looks:
Krakatoa
Neat!
I’ll probably be a bit useless for a few days, after I get my new laptop I’ll start getting a bit more active, right now I’m on a crappy laptop in my hotel in LA so I can’t really do too much. One thing I’m not sure if is supported yet but might be useful is TP support, I know the guys at Blur and a few other studios would take advantage of that.
However if it’s a pain, or dealing with Cebas is too much of a pain then it mightn’t be worth while…
Other than that (again I haven’t really opened it yet) but one thing I found with the original renderer was that it only had pixels 2x2 or 3x3, I’m not sure if that’s changed but it’d be great to have 1x1, and more importantly go much bigger like 5x5 or 10x10, which might be useful in some situations where you want to cover more ground with less particles, then blur the heck out of them at a later date.
Eitherway I’ll make some useful feedback (and cool images) once I open it and know what I’m talking about 
btw mark can you email me at amckay@allanmckay.com and tell me yer icq? I lost my old icq, and it’d be great to keep in touch so I can drag you out for a beer next time I’m over your way!
Cheers!
Allan McKay
There’s TP in the UI, but I don’t know if it works, since my TP skills are suck. Maybe I’ll give it a go.
Where is this size setting?
- Chad
edit: Whoa, this went off topic fast… Sorry
The thinking particles support is pretty preliminary, and doesn’t yet support all the material type options in particle flow. I’m hoping to be able to improve that for a future release, but for 1.0 I think it will stay pretty simple.
The particle size option has been changed to the filter setting. It’s the choice between nearest neighbor, bilinear, and bicubic. Bilinear is what used to be called 1x1, and bicubic is what used to be called 3x3.
There are a few options for doing bigger particle sizes, such as instancing small clusters of particles, or using facing bitmaps. What do you imagine would be most useful with things like this?
Cheers,
Mark
Fusion’s particles have a point cluster option that is very useful. It respects rotation and scale, but only uses them to translate the secondary points. The number of points in a cluster can be random, as well, so you could have clusters ranging from say, 3 to 10 points in number.