AWS Thinkbox Discussion Forums

Krakatoa Cloner bug?

Hey, I have a particle system PRT file saved from standard pflow source.
When I put a Krakatoa Cloner modifier with Spherical distribution to a PRT Loader, it shows correct amount of total particles (after cloning), but viewport particles disappear or are showing initial loaded number of particles. Worse - krakatoa rendering is processing the “after cloning” number of paticles but renders only the ones within initial PRT Loader. I’ve double checked viewport %, render %, I also checked if they are not overlapping the same point, I added the same instanced modifier to a sample prtvolume sphere - and there it works. Prt file has all standard channels including normals and tangents that can be displayed via Viewport Display: Normals/Tangents selection.
It’s the first time I have problem with cloner.

Max 2017, most recent krakatoa.

Could you provide a scene and at least one PRT file to reproduce this?
I will try to build one myself, but chances are the problem is rather subtle…

EDIT: I created a PRT Loader, and added a Cloner with default settings. PRT Loader had 10,000 particles, Cloner replaced each with 100. Ended up rendering 1 million particles (and they looked like the Cloner worked). The viewport shows by default 10%, but if set to 100%, it showed them all. Keep in mind that the viewport might refuse to draw the particles at all if the count gets very high - depending on your graphics card memory, the limit could be somewhere around 10 to 100 million. After that, Nitrous could refuse to draw the points. The Cloner has a hard limit defaulting to 1 million particles, but it appears to be broken at the moment and does not limit anything. (Will log it as a bug.)
Not sure about the rendering problem you described, I really need to see the scene and esp. the PRT file you used.

In my case it’s not a problem of high number of particles. Even adding a value of 2 prt cloner particles per one original to a light prt (1000 points) doesn’t make things better. I attach the very simple clean scene and a single frame of original prt for use in this scene. Tested this file and no joy here.

best,
nl
FAST_SCENES_2017.zip (595 KB)

Can you start signing your posts more obviously, I did not know with whom I was dealing until I saw the names of the missing textures :laughing:

Anyway, the problem is that you saved a bunch of channels that have no good content, and one of those channels was Scale which is [0,0,0] everywhere. I would postulate that the default we save should have been [1,1,1] when the value is not known, so I will log a bug against that for saving PFlows. But this Scale channel is what is killing the PRT Cloner, since we read the data from the Scale channel to actually scale the Radius of the Spherical distribution! So your particles are produced, but scaled down to a single point, and it looks like nothing is changing!

Simplest fix is to drop a Magma between the PRT Loader and the PRT Cloner, set an Output:Scale and then press SHIFT+7 to connect a Vector [1,1,1] to override the [0,0,0]. And voila! It produces the right distribution!

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