Wishlist: Sorted particles

Deprecated Krakatoa SR Beta Discussion
1

I’ve mentioned this for KrakatoaMX a few times in the past, but it’s even more critical for us with SR…

I’d really like to have a flag for sorted particles. I’m thinking you just need a boolean for whether it’s sorted and a vector for where you are sorted to. So relatively miniscule data needs to be passed around, but it would really speed SR up for us.

Currently if you save out a PRT file, it IS sorted to the camera, but if you feed the file back to Krakatoa, there’s no way to tell it that it’s already sorted. So any changes we make to the render that does not require a resort (like changing the shading/density or the DOF settings) would be a lot faster.

In the context of what we’re working on, a Fusion plugin, we have 1 particle stream rendering out multiple render passes that the user will comp the results together downstream. But each pass requires a resort even though they all come from the same camera. It seems really wasteful.

2

When I add the particle caching in SR, I can keep track of which camera it’s sorted by. Then if the cached particles are re-rendered, it will check to see if it’s already sorted to the correct camera. That would be a relatively easy optimization.

3

Thanks. Hadn’t thought about it that way.

We were assuming that we’d render once with Krakatoa out to a PRT (in memory or on disk) and then pull that result as the “cache” for subsequent renders. But we’d need to be able to change some things about the PRT output, like the sorted flag and maybe some other things, like compression settings.

Not sure what’s simpler.