Krakatoa

[rebolt]

Ok gotcha Thanks Joel, Johny & Bobo. I am facing a problem right now as i am rendering the smoke with “Force Addictive Mode” But as i am rendering the whole sequence i am not getting the Alpha of the smoke although if i render without Force Addictive Mode, then i am getting the alpha for the smoke. Why is that happening ?

[dim1984kimo]

hi,

I noticed the krakatoa render had its own ‘grid-like’ shader, as my attachment, how come?

Did I make something wrong?

[Bobo]

Ok gotcha Thanks Joel, Johny & Bobo. I am facing a problem right now as i am rendering the smoke with “Force Addictive Mode” But as i am rendering the whole sequence i am not getting the Alpha of the smoke although if i render without Force Addictive Mode, then i am getting the alpha for the smoke. Why is that happening ?

Additive Rendering does produce alpha. It is the way it is.

Additive Rendering is fully Self-Illuminated with zero Absorption and zero Diffusion. Just the RGB is accumulated, no alpha because a particle with no absorption and diffusion does not block or diffuse light as it passes through it.

If you need something like Alpha, you can use the RGB’s intensity (or render Additive with white color) to get something similar to Alpha. But keep in mind that Alpha in Volumetric (non-additive) mode describes the resulting volumetric density as seen through the cloud, so if you composite on top of some object, the Alpha will define how much you see of that background (the more particles, the less light passes through and the less you see).

In the case of Additve rendering, nothing is blocking your sight through the cloud because the particles are just glowing and otherwise completely transparent. If there were anything behind the particles, it would be fully seen, with the accumulated particle rendering ADDED on top of it to brighten it up.

Hope this helps.

[Bobo]

hi,

I noticed the krakatoa render had its own ‘grid-like’ shader, as my attachment, how come?

Did I make something wrong?

Nope, no gridlike shader. What you are seeing are the segments of the teapot becoming visible as particles are placed on the surface. This happens when using Position Object in PFlow (which places particles on the FACES of the teapot which tend to be flat segments), or when using the PRT Volume object of Krakatoa where the geometry is converted to a level set and smoothing group info is lost - see here

Since the number of polygons does not affect much neither the speed of surface distribution in PFlow nor the speed of volumetric distribution in PRT Loader, simply increase the number of segments on the object (or use turbosmooth) and the resulting particle cloud will also get smoother.

[dim1984kimo]

Thanks, bobo.

I’ve read your link and get the answer. My question is about the filter I didn’t turn it on, I’d turn on the meshsmooth.

My question is this shader stand a line, it is too procedural.

This is what I want, and I find it in your link.

Thanks! I’m sorry about I didn’t read that first. It’s really important before I mention a question here.

[Bobo]

Thanks, bobo.

I’ve read your link and get the answer. My question is about the filter I didn’t turn it on, I’d turn on the meshsmooth.

My question is this shader stand a line, it is too procedural.

This is what I want, and I find it in your link.

Thanks! I’m sorry about I didn’t read that first. It’s really important before I mention a question here.

First of all, I don’t expect everybody to have read all the documentation. In fact, I know that nobody reads manuals, ever (I know I don’t ). So don’t feel bad about not having read about it before posting.

As for the lines seen in the first image, that is a side effect of the PRT Volume creating a single particle in the center of each voxel the levelset has created. In v1.5.1, we introduced the ability to create a user-defined number of randomly placed particles in each voxel, removing the grid look and producing a more diffused cloud. See this page for details.

Alternatively, you can add a high-frequency Noise modifier to a PRT Volume or PRT Loader to displace the particle positions and break the grid look, or create a MagmaFlow that shifts the positions based on a DNoise operator’s output. But if you are using the PRT Volume object, it will solve the problem by just changing a radio button.

[JohnnyRandom]

Simply resaving a PRT Loader’s content multiple times without any modifiers does not change anything about the particles since partitioning requires some Random Seed to change aspects of the particle data (typically positions).

Exactly the point I missed, err… failed to mention

Yep, understood, the result is not the same, merely a nice trick to increase the density without running it all through Pflow. I don’t know about your machine but I start getting up around 10+million and Pflow begins to really bog down. I did just notice, that without Deadline (I happen to be one of those that should read the WHOLE manual) that I can start multiple versions of max running the same scene and pass off single or ranges of partitions to each running version to utilize all of the processors in my machine (because of Pflows singularity threadedness), nice trick

Thanks for the Deadline info, yes I didn’t understand the Client/Slave structure. I wasn’t sure if the Client was considered one of the two.

[giangriver]

Since this thread looks like the place to talk about Krakatoa until it is released, I guess I could provide some more simple examples to give you an idea how it works and what it does.

 As mentioned before, there are several shading modes, including Additive and Volumetric Density. 
 
 The following is a Teapot rendered as a particle cloud (each vertex is taken as a particle, the max. number of vertices of a teapot primitive with 64 segments is slighly more than 130K). I used the default custom particle color (white) and a density of 0.005  (which in the UI is expressed as two values - Density 5.0 and Density Exponent -2. This way, changing the Exponent (10^X) to -3 gives you quickly another zero after the decimal point, going up with positive exponents can increase the density quickly by orders of magnitude like 10, 100, 1000 and so on.
 [img]http://www.scriptspot.com/bobo/krakatoa/Teapot_Vertices_Customcolor_Additive_5_minus2.jpg[/img]
 
 This is the same rendering, but using the wireframe color of the mesh:
 [img]http://www.scriptspot.com/bobo/krakatoa/Teapot_Vertices_Wireframe_Additive_5_minus2.jpg[/img]
 
 The following used the self-illumination channel of the material assigned to the teapot. I added a Cellular map to show that the channel is fully evaluated incl. any textures in it. Note that you have to check the "Use Color" for the Self.Illumination color to be used correctly.
 [img]http://www.scriptspot.com/bobo/krakatoa/Teapot_Vertices_MatSelfIllum_CellularMap_Additive_5_minus2.jpg[/img]
 
 Now we switch to Volumetric Density - same setup and density values, but still no lighting. Thus, the teapot is self-illuminated:
 [img]http://www.scriptspot.com/bobo/krakatoa/Teapot_Vertices_MatSelfIllum_CellularMap_Volumetric_NoLighting_5_minus2.jpg[/img]
 
 Then I added an Omni Light and turned Lighting on in Krakatoa. 
 You can see the shadow casting, but also that light is passing through the particles (since only about 130K) and illuminating the backside (inside, bottom left) of the teapot:
 [img]http://www.scriptspot.com/bobo/krakatoa/Teapot_Vertices_MatSelfIllum_CellularMap_Volumetric_Lighting_5_minus2%20copy.jpg[/img]
 
 Now it is time to use Particle Flow to emit particles from the surface of the Teapot. All the other settings are identical. To avoid heavy self-shadowing of the particles when placed on the same surface, I used an offset of -1 to give the "particle teapot" a bit of thickness. The flow uses only 1M particles.
 [img]http://www.scriptspot.com/bobo/krakatoa/Teapot_PFlow_MatSelfIllum_CellularMap_Volumetric_5_minus2.jpg[/img]
 
 Note that we can control the density globally by changing the Exponent to -3 while keeping everything else identical (including the particle count of one million). Now we can see through the volumetric cloud:
 [img]http://www.scriptspot.com/bobo/krakatoa/Teapot_PFlow_MatSelfIllum_CellularMap_Volumetric_5_minus3.jpg[/img]
 
 The Volumetric Density mode only makes sense with lighting. Here is what you would get from 1M particles with volumetric density but no lighting and no material:
 [img]http://www.scriptspot.com/bobo/krakatoa/Teapot_PFlow_Customcolor_Volumetric_NoLighting_5_minus2.jpg[/img]
 
 Enabling the Lighting shades the particles as before. Note that version 1.0 of Krakatoa will also support normals per particle and will thus feature specular highlights, too.
 [img]http://www.scriptspot.com/bobo/krakatoa/Teapot_PFlow_Customcolor_Volumetric_Lighting_5_minus2.jpg[/img]
 
 Why would you want to render anything as a cloud of particles? 
 Here is a possible situation illustrating what you could do with it... 

(Click Here For a Quicktime 7 movie, 1.4 MB)

This example contains 100 frames of 1 million particles. Rendering time on single CPU Athlon64  2.1 GHz with just 1GB of RAM was  22 seconds per frame incl. PFlow calculations, lighting and shading with 4 passes of motion blur. (each pass shaded in approx. 3 seconds, so 12 seconds was shading, the rest was calculating the flow and the lighting).

Please share for me tutorial using krakatoa above
I only study krakatoa two day.
giang_river1983@yahoo.com.vn
Thank you very much

[Bobo]

Please share for me tutorial using krakatoa above
I only study krakatoa two day.
Thank you very much

I don’t have a tutorial, but I have posted the Max 9 Scene File before:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost.php?p=5247635&postcount=398

Be sure to open Particle View and disable the Material Node, otherwise you will get mapped particles before and blue particles after the collision with the deflector.

I tested it in the current Krakatoa 1.5.1 build and it works otherwise, despite originating from an old Beta version prior to 1.0.

[loran]

Hey Bobo,
I just wander if a Lite Version of Kratoa is planed? Krakatoa is very very powerfull but very very complex to use with tons of tabs settings to understand. By Lite version I mean only the renderer for millions of particle flow particles, with no option for object reconstuction and mapping in particles or things like that.
What I want the most is a point render with shadow ability.

[Bobo]

Hey Bobo,
I just wander if a Lite Version of Kratoa is planed? Krakatoa is very very powerfull but very very complex to use with tons of tabs settings to understand. By Lite version I mean only the renderer for millions of particle flow particles, with no option for object reconstuction and mapping in particles or things like that.
What I want the most is a point render with shadow ability.

When we decided to make Krakatoa a commercial product, the plan was for a “simple point renderer”. So much for that…
No, there is no such plan because Krakatoa depends on its settings to produce what you need. What is possible to do though is dumb down the interface to just the main controls - the whole UI is written in MAXScript after all. But this is like asking for a Max UI that looks like MS Paint - it makes no sense because without the options, you cannot get good results.

The current UI allows you to HIDE all the tabs you don’t need and leave just the Main Controls and a couple more that you use often. (you can save and load UI presets too).

But I am all against changing something that is powerful already into an iPhone app.

[loran]

I just remember there was a thread about maxscript point render where you first spoke about the plugin your were developping . one of the first feature film with it was “Crushed” or something.
Yes the base idea turned to a very powerfull set of tool. I am just lazy to learn from scratch on all those menus. It like trying to switch from max to maya! their is so much setting it s like a stand alone software! ok maybe I will really try to understand the way it works.
Anyway it s an amazing tool you ve done Bobo

[Glacierise]

You just need to find the big red geek button and click once Then at 4 AM it all suddenly goes into place

[jigu]

Oh Krakatoa is actually very simple to use.

Just make lots of particles (use millions of) and light up scene and assign materials to particles and just render as we do normally with mentalray or with vray. (adjust light colors, shadow, material colors, opacity)

If you want to render with matte objects just select objects in scene that you want it to be matte objects, and open “Matte objects” rollout and click there magic button which will automatically add selected objects in matte objects.

Now render again. Very simple.

and all you need to do later is to use good density. General rule is high particle counts then lower the density. Or less particles use pretty high density.

It’s way to simple.

[JohnnyRandom]

I just remember there was a thread about maxscript point render where you first spoke about the plugin your were developping.

Loran you remember this? No shadows though

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost.php?p=5442519&postcount=1765

Although I would recommend Krakatoa over Poor Man’s Krakatoa any day. As Bobo said a powerful app to provide beautiful results Although the interface my look daunting it is only because it is very well organized, 99% of you work goes through the Main Controls Rollout (with of course the exception of KCM’s).

[SachinPorwal]

hello everyone few day back i saw some particle test videos of krakatoa on youtube(video link attached) which are awesome and i want to know how can i create this type of effects using krakatoa,main problem with me is still i am not able to understand how can i use other renderers with karkatoa and how to use default materials of max with karkatoa so please guide me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c4WYzr30B0
http://www.youtube.com/user/MatthiasmVideos
http://www.youtube.com/user/MatthiasmVideos#p/u/2/NnTyvWdHDvE

[noouch]

The Krakatoa documentation is very detailed, maybe you should take a look:

http://software.primefocusworld.com/software/support/krakatoa/contents.php

Specifically the Matte Objects and Materials entries.

[loran]

Loran you remember this? No shadows though

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost.php?p=5442519&postcount=1765

yes I do

Ok thank you for your replies on krakatoa easyness. I will try

[giangriver]

Thank you BoBo about file 3ds max demo
This is test
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwfEKfLvmco
But I want to ask one object have a lot of material things is, how is it add material in particle

[Bobo]

Thank you BoBo about file 3ds max demo
This is test
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwfEKfLvmco
But I want to ask one object have a lot of material things is, how is it add material in particle

If you are using PFlow directly, just add a Material Operator with a Standard Material.
*The Diffuse color (or map) will be used for the Color of the particles.
*The Self-Illumination color or map will be used for the Emission channel of the particles (if enabled).
*The Filter color or map will be used for the Absorption channel of the particles (if enabled).
*The Opacity color or map will be used to provide the particle Density.
*The Specular Level and Glossiness will be copied into the SpecularLevel and SpecularPower channels (if Phong Surface is selected and the channels are enabled).

If you are using a PRT Loader to render saved particles, you can assign a Standard or Krakatoa Material to it and use the above channels.

If your material contains 2D maps (like Bitmap Texture for example), you will also need correct UV coordinates, or you have to use Object space coordinates.
If your material contains 3D maps (like Cellular, Noise etc.), there will work directly.