Krakatoa

#781

Bobo will they be putting up the 1st day of the presentation too?
Great stuff its a shame you don’t get this kind of info in the ‘making of’ when any Blue Ray film is purchased!

#782

First part is already up:

http://area.autodesk.com/player/loader.swf?p=/player/main.swf&f=http://areadownloads.autodesk.com/oc/ibc09/sig09_d1_frantic01.flv

Take care,

#783

Thanks Kees.

#784

Awesome - thanks for posting kees :thumbsup:

#785

Also nice 20+ page spread in Cinefex 119 about the making of GI Joe, insights from all the fx houses, pretty good read :slight_smile:

#786

Hey Krakatoa Maniacs!

This is a quick reminder that the deadline of the Krakatoa Contest is near - Thursday October 1, 2009!
Please consider submitting your work in the next two days!

Good luck!

#787

omg, I could have sworn I’ve read somewhere that the contest ended a few weeks ago. :argh:Thanks for the heads up bobo. :slight_smile:

#788

Nice ink piece for CCTV by weareflink – they use fumeFX and krakatoa to make some beautiful animations!

http://www.weareflink.com/index_ct.html

via
motionographer

#789

Wow that’s really nice. Kudos to the artists :slight_smile:

#790

That’s a great spot, interesting making of too. Thanks for posting :slight_smile:

#791

yeah thats realy ealy great, exactly the type of animation i love :thumbsup:

#792

Hey everyone,

Just wanted to let you know Krakatoa v1.5.1.38002 was released for public download today. It uses the same license as 1.5.0, and of course works in Evaluation mode without a license, except for a watermark at resolutions above 480x360, disabled network rendering and disabled bonus PFlow modifiers (Geometry Test, Lookup and Collision).

For a list of bug fixes and new features, please check out the Release Notes.

For a write up on the major changes, please read here.

Here is a short list of the new features:
*Grid and Random particle distribution per voxel in PRT Volume.
*Support for Selection Channel in MagmaFlow.
*Support for procedural particle culling using the Selection Channel.
*New Curve node in MagmaFlow for mapping input values between 0 and 1 to custom values.
*New Schematic Flow tool to control and debug your Krakatoa rendering setup.
*Much faster value History access and new color value history in Global Render Values.
*New Select Partitions To Load dialog when loading sequences into PRT Loader.
*Copy and Paste of sequence names between PRT Loaders.
*Rewritten local and network Partitioning that works well with Thinking Particles
*A lot of smaller improvements, icons etc. plus all the bug fixes that make it a lot more stable and usable.

#793

“*Grid and Random particle distribution per voxel in PRT Volume.”

Fantastic! Looks like a healthy batch of fixes and updates! Always welcome and thankful for such a hard working team over there! :slight_smile:

#794

You should have tried Pixie instead. It kicked Entropy’s ass for point rendering at the time (speed and memory-wise) – mainly because of this project on which its author used it.
And it is open source and comes with RenderMan shading language support. :wink:

.mm

#795

Strangely enough, we had Pixie around that time (for Flood render tests), not sure why we did not try it out. I am glad we decided to do our own thing though. We cannot promise Renderman SL, but we are working on improving Krakatoa’s shading capabilities :slight_smile:

#796

3Delight exposed their shader VM through an API. As a coder I’d say it shouldn’t take more than half an hour to integrate that with a particle renderer.

For open programmable shading, keep an eye on SPI’s OSL.

.mm

#797

Oh, we do. :slight_smile:
Having worked with Gelato on the only feature film it was ever used in, we cannot wait to get our hands on whatever Larry releases.

#798

Really? I honesty can’t understand that. :slight_smile:
Gelato was a complete failure, not only as a product but also as a piece of software. I tested it when working at RSP in 2005 and honestly, 3Delight kicked its ass. Speed wise, quality wise, features wise. Price wise. Not even considering the costs of the required hardware.

A big place in London once got a couple dozen boxes with nVidia GPUs to test it at the time. They had to shut them down because their normal farms super expensive AC still couldn’t keep up with the heat they generated because of the GPUs (ignoring the power consumption, which would mean an issue too, in Soho, once your farm reaches a certain size). And just as with 3Delight, Gelato was reportedly slower than PRMan at the time – which, too, doesn’t use any GPU.

Lastly, Gelato had some of the same issues as had BMRT & Entropy. Very suprising for a renderer that supposedly was a complete rewrite … :wink:

I have high hopes for OSL though – as long as it is implementation agnostic. Aka: I hope it is not a ray-tracing centric shading language. :slight_smile:

.mm

#799

Keep in mind we did not have to pay for it or even for the cards, so some of your points did not apply to us. :slight_smile:
I hear from people here who have experience with both 3Delight and Gelato that they prefer the Gelato shading language for various reasons. Since I am not an LnR guy (I merely sit next to one), and I am not even a programmer, I am not going to argue how good it was since it obviously had its problems. But it worked for us.

Thanks for the insight!

#800

[QUOTE=Bobo]Keep in mind we did not have to pay for it or even for the cards, so some of your points did not apply to us. :slight_smile:
“Some” as in “one”: price. The same was true for the company in London. But it doesn’t help if you get 100 blades + renderer licenses for free if using them to do actual work means that your building goes up in flames. :wink:

I hear from people here who have experience with both 3Delight and Gelato that they prefer the Gelato shading language for various reasons.

The only difference were that function signatures used commata instead of semicoli for parameter separation. Aka:

void foo( float bar; color baz ) { // RMan SL
    ...
 }
 
 void foo( float bar, color baz ) { // Gelato SL
    ...
 }

I’d rather not say what one could feel inclined to conclude about a shader saying their preference for a certain language depended on that. :wink:

Since I am not an LnR guy (I merely sit next to one)

I’d love to have a beer with these people that you speak of once and hear what the other of the ‘various reasons’ are/were (if you do indeed count using ‘,’ over ‘;’ as one). Since that was the only ‘difference’ between GSL and RSL. :stuck_out_tongue:

.mm

P.S.: sorry for diverting from this thread’s topic, but this couldn’t be left uncommented.