I am diving into the fluid tools (hehe…sorry) and I was curious to know if there is a way to save out my main emitter particles and my spray/foam particles as separate PRT files. Would I need to just create two ‘X-Particle Source’ objects and just hide one at a time while I save the particle cache files or is there a way to just run the render queue once and have Krakatoa save two separate PRT sequences?
This sounds like the way to go. Krakatoa only saves/renders what is not hidden, so as long as you can have two separate emitters with their separate Sources, it should be easy. Please let us know how it works…
Another note: Currently, the Krakatoa XP Source works per-emitter, while the Krakatoa TP Source works per-group (or All Groups by default). So if you need to separate particles of one Emitter into two groups and save each group separately, you might have to send your XP particles through TP and save its groups instead.
I came across this issue in some of my tests.
What I found was any particles that get spawned from another “Main” emitter need to be cached out to be able to use on a separate PRT Loader.
You can’t save PRT files for spawned particles only (without the Main emitter) unless they’re cached because those particles need the “Main” emitter to tell it when, where, and how to spawn. If you turn off the Main emitter without caching the spawned particles you get nothing when saving PRT files, but if you leave the Main emitter on you’ll get all the particles from both emitters when saving out PRT files.
So what I did was, I created a cache object and in it’s inclusion tab I set mode to “Include” and dragged my spawn emitter into its object field. That way the cache object only caches out the spawned particles from the spawning emitter. Once the spawning emitter has been cached, you can turn off the Main emitter and save out PRT files for the spawning emitter by it self. Then you can save out PRT files for the Main emitter and adjust the two separately as needed with two different PRT Loaders.
Hope that helps,
Shawn