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Krakatoa particles render cache in Maya?

Hi, I am just starting to use Krakatoa in Maya after using Krakatoa for 3DS Max for several years. One key render setting in Maya seems to be missing: the particle and light cache buttons. I looked all through the render settings and I do not see them. Do these not exist in Maya? I am using a trial version so I don’t know if this makes a difference.

Hi Jim!
No, the PCache and LCache options are only in 3ds Max and are not part of Krakatoa SR, and are by extension not in Krakatoa MY or Krakatoa C4D yet.
They were on the wishlist though. I have no information whether they will be added any time soon due to the way Krakatoa is integrated in the different applications. I will make sure the developers know you were asking… :slight_smile:

Great, thanks Bobo! I’m sure I’ll have more questions like this… like for instance I cannot find the “Clipping/Culling object” drop down menu to use a mesh to clip into the prt loader object.

The non-3ds Max implementations of Krakatoa do not provide a built in particle culling in the PRT Loader. In fact, if we could take it back, we would have removed it from 3ds Max the moment it became possible with Magma. It was a source of endless pain and suffering for our KMX developer :wink:

However, the Krakatoa MY version does not support deleting particles yet - if you want to remove particles, you can only set their Density to 0.0. So you would add a Magma to the PRT Loader, pick one or more mesh objects as the volumes, and use either an InVolume operator which performs the same check as the Culling in KMX, or a NearestPoint operator with a Logical comparison of the Distance value and 0.0. If Distance is negative, the closest point was seen from the inside of the mesh and you can consider the particle inside. You can then output the original Density value or 1.0 as the Density if the point was found to be outside, and 0.0 if it was inside.

You can see this in the following Webinar video:
youtu.be/8NxP8w-tYDs?t=502

Obviously this does not reduce the number of particles in memory when rendering, but it is still better than nothing. We hope to support a Select channel in the future and provide the equivalent of the Krakatoa Delete modifier…

Hope this helps.

Btw, you can find both Krakatoa MY Webinars (Introduction to KMY, Introduction to Magma) here:
thinkboxsoftware.com/krakatoa-my-webinars/

Thanks Bobo, that does help a lot! I appreciate the explanation and the links. I’m sure I should be able to get this to work.

BTW - I used to work with Ben and Chad at TheVisualMD - aka Anatomical Travelogue… that’s where I learned to use Krakatoa in 3DS Max. They had nothing but nice things to say about you! I’m just getting started using Krakatoa in Maya so I’ll probably be back here with more questions but I’ll be sure to watch the webinar first.

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