Krakatoa

#121

Krakatoa has been in Beta for quite some time. Some people who participated in this thread were given access to the Beta program. Right now we are approaching the final stages of the Beta so it is probably too late to join the testing. We allow our beta testers to release images and animations made with Krakatoa, that’s why you are seeing some in this thread.

When it is ready, we intend to make it available for download as an evaluation version (watermarked output and disabled network rendering would be the limitations) so anyone would be able to test drive it.

Before you ask - no, the price has not been announced yet, but we are having some very interesting discussions internally… Stay tuned.

#122

Oh neat! Thanks for the info!

#123

Looks like I forgot to mention WHERE that montage is…

Here we go - this one contains a signicant number of Krakatoa shots, both tests, demos and production shots from various movies like Stay, Cursed and Superman Returns. In addition, it shows some Flood and Flood:Surf work.

Go to
http://www.franticfilms.com/commercial/
and click on the RnD > Montage (Fluid, Crystal, Particles) link.
It requires Quicktime 7.

#124

Just a quick question…
Seeing this thread I can imagine the power of Krakatoa, but I was just wondering was Krakatoa use for Spiderman 3 as well??
If not, does anyone know what technique was used for it?

#125

Sony doesn’t use Max.
I think the sand was made in Houdini and rendered with an instancer written for the film.

#126

Ah, I see…
but looking at the Krakatoa samples I think soon it will be possible to do it in max as well without a hell of a machine :slight_smile:

#127

Actually we are pretty happy that Spiderman 3 is coming out so close to the release of Krakatoa - everyone and their grandma will want to do sandmen in the coming months :wink:

#128

Good point,
I believe over here every production might want to make a sand man or anything from sand… I might get more jobs hahahaha… but will I be able to afford Krakatoa on a personal budget??.. hmmm…

#129

Wow. It looks like a fantastic piece of software! I don’t think there is any similar renderer out there in the market right now, so it could be great for small and medium shops as well as for freelancers. The public demo es also a great idea :thumbsup:
I’m very surprised about the speed and the ability to handle shadows properly. A feature that would be nice for the future would be the possibility of implementing dicing (adaptative would be the best) to handle an infinite number of particles regardless of the amount of RAM.

Keep up the great work, Bobo! :scream:

#130

Thanks Daniel, coming from you this is a great compliment!

We have discussed strategies to allow unlimited particle counts in the future, but it would always come with a certain speed hit - not as slow as Windows swapping to disk, but still slower than loading and processing all particles straight from RAM. At this point we believe that adding more GB to a 64 bit machine is a much better solution (it might turn out to be cheaper than the time it would take otherwise).
Processing unlimited particle counts with additive shading would be easily possible though.

The list of possible features for future releases is long and exciting, but we have to deliver 1.0 first…

Btw, can’t wait to see Spidey 3 :wink:

#131

I visited Sony last summer, and I saw the workstation where the guy was working on the Sandman swipe scene, and I could’ve sworn he was using Maya.

#132

What scene was that? We didn’t use Maya for Sandman, so maybe it was some destruction shot?

#133

Just stuck up a wee test movie done with krakatoa, done with around 100,000 particles with movement from fume, around two seconds a frame. http://www.joconnell.com/uploads/krakatoa/krakatoa_mocap.mov

#134

Wow!! That looks niiiice.

#135

Cool video…Looks great.

A cool thing to play with also is the coloring. You can get some cool results if you set up your pfflow with settings like this.

This is a generic fire coloring. But it can be tweaked to represent any other color. It just takes some tweaking. (requires the use of Additive Density)

Also, you might be able to clean up the stepping just by lowering your ticks on render in pflow. It will eliminate the banding that is taking place when the object moves fast.

Also you should check out the partitioning feature in Krakatoa. This can bring you up to as much as your computer can render which will give greater results.

Mark

#136

Yeah I still haven’t gotten to the stage of the really smooth renders you guys are getting - kind of like the smoke on the xsi packaging. Since I’m the max guy in an XSI house and batchserve isn’t supported anymore we should really look at deadline too. Must have a fiddle in some downtime.

#137

Hey joconell. Great video man. The particles looks great with fumefx. How did u get the fumefx work along with it ? Can u post the particle setup for this scene ? :thumbsup:

#138

Pretty straight forward bharat - you do a fume simulation of your character going through the fume grid first of all. Then you make a basic particle flow setup and use a new operator called fumeFX follow which lets you pass particle flow through the movement of your fume sim.

#139

That just single handedly inspired me to delve deeper into particle effects :D.

#140

don’t do it - it’s a pain in the hole :smiley: