Krakatoa

#861

thanks Bobo for your detailed explanation.
For the moment, I tried simple materials applied on my sources and it works (of course with some lights in the scene)! :slight_smile:

#862

:slight_smile:
You can make them render without lights, too.
I would suggest reading my related Blog here:
http://lotsofparticles.blogspot.com/

#863

First off, I come in peace in this post :smiley:

Here’s a little thing I’m working on in Houdini. Looking for some look feedback from you guys, not really looking to be a competition, but looking for some feedback on trying to get a similar workflow and look going.

#864

I’d say you have the workflow down! Looks great! Not being that experienced in Houdini myself; is that a straight out of the box setup?

#865

Requieres a bit of tweaking and setup, plus caching and a procedural shader to load in the bgeo(written out geometry files) at render time, but it’s all built in stuff.

And yeah It’s a straight up render here, no comp work.

#866

Welcome :slight_smile:

Here is the feedback I tend to give people using Krakatoa - not sure how applicable it is to Houdini, but anyway…

In general, most new users of Krakatoa tend to make every particle stand out by setting the density too high. In fact, I read somewhere on a forum a comment about one rendering from another application (might have been Houdini) where someone said “looks grainy like Krakatoa” - which shows that the amount of newbies posting Krakatoa tests on YouTube is giving the renderer a bad reputation already :wink:

The point of Krakatoa though is to render many millions of particles with relatively low density. The result is very smooth quality because it takes dozens or even hundreds of particles to cover a single pixel, and the gradients and anti-aliasing are quite smooth.
A great example of good Krakatoa work is the Ink video:
http://www.weareflink.com/index_ct.html

So if you can tweak the shading to get rid of the single particles floating around to get everything to be a bit more “smokey” (unless you are aiming at a sand storm look, of course), it might look ever more impressive.

Hope this helps!

#867

hi…
is there any way to use magmaflow color by age from this tutorial:
http://software.primefocusworld.com/software/support/krakatoa/magmaflow_fading_off_particle_density_by_age.php
directing from PFLOW without saving particles to PRT Loader ?
(by using global or somthing ?)

thanks
yuval

#868

Yes, open the Global Render Values rollout, create a new Global Channels Override Set (this automatically creates and opens a global KCM), change the flow to the one from the tutorial and your particles should render as expected.

Note that a Global KCM is applied at render time only so there is no way to preview in the viewport without saving to PRT first. Let me know if you have any problems with this approach…

As usual, you need to define a LifeSpan by adding a Delete operator to the PFlow, otherwise the particles will have infinite life expectancy and won’t change color. But you probably know that already :wink:

#869

Thats Kraktastic! Kraktacular?

I hadent seen that before, great use of fume and krakatoa, lovely ad.

#870

i created the same flows to the global but the only color i see in render is the first flag color of the gradient ramp…
maybe i need to add to the pflow somthing extra ?
(like “krakatoa option” or somthing?)

another quastion : can i assign different magma flows and materials to different pflows?

thanks…
yuval

#871

Try this:
*Add the Global Channel Override as described, make it set the TextureCoord channel. (equivalent to Mapping Channel 1).
*Enable >Override Color and put the Gradient Ramp into the Map slot of the Color Override.

If you would render now, the Color Override should apply the Gradient Ramp using Mapping Channel 1 created by the Global KCM and do the Color By Age trick.

Using a Material in the PFlow does not work because the KCM is applied AFTER the material is evaluated, thus the UVs do not exist yet when the Gradient Ramp is processed.

I found a bug in the processing of Global KCMs - if you add another KCM to the Global Channel Overrides with a Texture Input node setting the Color channel AFTER the TextureCoord one, it does not “see” the UVs. You have to put it BELOW the TextureCoord KCM - looks like the stack of the Override holder is evaluated in the wrong order (there was a bug like that we fixed on regular objects, but we must have missed this). So you can alternatively add a Color KCM below the TextureCoord global KCM and set the Gradient using it…

And I will go log the bug :slight_smile:
(EDIT: It is now fixed for the upcoming 1.5.2 update)

You cannot assign different MagmaFlows to different PFlows yet. This might be possible in the future. We plan MagmaFlow Materials (the node flow will live in a dedicated material that could be assigned to any particle system including PFlow), and possibly a scene object that captures particles directly from PFlow (kind of like a Compound object) allowing you to add arbitrary KCMs and Deformation Modifiers to the PFlow particles without saving to disk.

#872

To be honest Bobo i think i’ve almost held this opinion as well. Everything that comes out of krakatoa seems to have a distinct look, but then when I see the people who really know what they are doing use it – the images that come out are stunning. I think also people sometimes forget no matter how beautiful krakatoa renders out your animation, if the particle animation isn’t good, the render isn’t going to be good. I think the examples provided within this thread and the primefocus forums are such great tools to work by, even for aspiring animators trying to learn the ropes. It may just be a few settings to tweak, but it’s learning how those tiny details make a render really shine. I personally thank you for all your hard work and your continuous support through the web.

cheers.

#873

I tried using a normal pflow as a matte, but Krakatoa won’t accept it. My scene is a mix of krakatoa particles and geometric pflow for bigger pieces, I just couldn’t use the particles as a matte.
Also, I have a realflow mesh to use as a matte, and it doesn’t work as it should. When i render a single frame, everything works well, and you can see the occlusion of the realflow mesh, but when I try to render the sequence, krakatoa simply ignores it. The realflow mesh is changing poly quantities as the sequence plays, so I wonder if the matte object update is not still fully developed?

#874

I remember having trouble with RealFlow meshes and Krakatoa. I had submitted a bug report, but the problem seemed to be Next Limit’s RealFlow plugin not updating the mesh at every frame as it should. I worked around the problem by writing a little script that consisted of a for() loop that called render() and then incremented the slider time. It’s clunky but it worked decently for me.

#875

Do you sell this script? is there any way I can convince you to provide it?

#876

Following the thread, some amazing work there… :thumbsup:

Regards

Als

PS
Are we there yet? :wink:

#877

:smiley: I second you on that: “Are we there yet?”

Please :wink:

#878

We are slowly moving in that direction, but not there yet.

#879

WooooooHoooooo! Slowly is better than not. Excellent!

#880

To sell it would be the most shameless money I ever made :wink:
I didn’t save it, but I think it went something like this:

for i in 1 to (animationrange.end.frame as integer) do
(
	outFile = @"G:\renderfiles\render_.tga"
	render outputfile:outFile cancelled:&wasCancelled outputHDRbitmap:true
	sliderTime += 1
	if wasCancelled then exit
)

Let me know how it works for you.