Software Description:
Krakatoa for Autodesk Maya (also known as KrakatoaMY or KMY for short) is a volumetric particle renderingplugin inplemented using the C++ Interface to Thinkbox Software’sKrakatoa renderer for Linux, Mac OSX and Microsoft Windowsoperating systems.
The first public Build 2.1.7.50419 was released on February 21st,2013. Note that the release number matches the Krakatoa corerenderer version shared with Krakatoa MX and Krakatoa SR. AllKrakatoa implementations share the same rendering core and shouldproduce identical, pixel-exact output given the same particle dataand settings. The latest build is v2.3.0.54157 released on December17th, 2013.
Krakatoa MY is fully integrated in the Maya User Interface. Itimplements various dedicated scene objects like a PRT Loader forloading particles from external file sequences, PRT Volume and PRTSurface for converting geometry volumes and surfaces to pointclouds. v2.3.0 introduced support for the Magma node-based channelediting system, allowing complex operations on large numbers ofparticles, data acquisition from other particles and scene meshesand so on.
Krakatoa MY requires its own separate workstation license when usedinteractively inside the Autodesk Maya User Interface. Thisincludes rendering and running Maya Batch from inside of Maya.
When rendering on the network, all Krakatoa implementations use thesame “krakatoa-render” license. This means you can network renderwith Krakatoa MX, Krakatoa MY or Krakatoa SR as needed without theneed to purchase separate render licenses for each.
Note that Krakatoa MY running in network rendering mode will alsocheck for the existence of a workstation license, but will notcheck it out. In other words, at least one Krakatoa MY workstationlicense must be purchased for network render licenses to operatecorrectly.
Major Features Overview
Renderer
The Krakatoa renderer is CPU-based, highly optimized and heavilymulti-threaded. It does not require the presence of a GPU and canbe used successfully on any hardware running Windows or Linuxincluding laptops and render nodes without dedicated high-endgraphics accelerators.
Krakatoa’s memory footprint adapts dynamically to the requestedfeatures, with a minimum memory usage of 26 bytes per particle.
Krakatoa supports volumetric and additive particle shading andallows the mixing of the two modes. The volumetric shading includesper-particle control over Color, Density, Emission and Absorption.The Density controls for the lighting and shading calculations canbe decoupled to provide higher control over the final results.
Krakatoa features both Particle (aka Point) rendering and Voxelrendering modes.
Self-shadowing and shadow casting from and onto matte (holdout)geometry objects are supported, including mesh and DTEX-basedholdouts. The basic Maya light sources (Point, Spot, Directional)are supported.
Krakatoa features integrated Motion Blur and Depth Of Field cameraeffects.
Render-time particle multiplication allows the creation of moreparticles than the original source provided.
Particle Sources
Krakatoa MY supports both native Maya Particles and nParticles;external particle sources loaded from disk via the PRT Loaderobject; procedurally generated particles from geometry volumes viathe PRT Volume object; and fractal-based distributions via the PRTFractal object.
Currently supported external particle file formats are Thinkbox’PRT file sequences, RealFlow BIN file sequences, and ASCIIComma-Separated Values CSV sequences.
Krakatoa MY includes a function for saving particle data to PRTfiles that can be used in custom scripts. It ships with a dedicatedPRT Saving/Partitioning scripted tool for generating multiplewedges of the same particle system to increase the final particlecount or for sharing data with the other implementations ofKrakatoa.
PRT Objects
PRT Loader
The PRT Loader object can be used to load one or more external filesequences. It exposes controls to define which sequences will beused at render time and which will be shown in the viewports, aswell as particle percentage and particle limit controls, variousloading and display methods.
The PRT Loader allows for particle retiming using offset andanimation curve controls. It can clamp the frame range using customstart and end frame and edge behaviors. The position interpolationcan be performed either linearly using the current frame’svelocity, or using cubic interpolation from the two nearestsurrounding frames.
PRT Volume
The PRT Volume object can be used to fill the volume of a polygonmesh with particles. This happens dynamically at render time andcan also be previewed interactively in the viewports.
The PRT Volume provides the option to distribute particles within arange from the geometry surface.
Normal vectors are automatically generated for all particles fromthe nearest geometry surface.
PRT Surface
The PRT Surface object can be used to quickly distribute randomparticles on the surface of a polygon mesh. This happensdynamically at render time and can also be previewed interactivelyin the viewports.
PRT Fractal
The PRT Fractal object can be used to create procedural fractalparticle distributions based on a random seed, iterations controland several animatable parameters.
Particle Channel Modifiers
Using dedicated Maya nodes, Krakatoa exposes several channelmodifiers to perform channel data operations on any valid particlesource usable by the renderer.
These modifiers include the setting of a Float or Vector Channel toa new value, the Scaling of an existing Channel by a Scalar factor,the Copying of one Channel into another, the assigning of a MayaMaterial shade tree to a particle cloud, and the Repopulation of aparticle system using Krakatoa’s render-time particlemultiplication algorithm.
The modifiers are added, reordered and removed using a dedicatedKrakatoa Modifier Editor tool accessible from the Krakatoashelf.
The most advanced modifier of them all is the Magma channel editoralso found in Krakatoa MX in other Thinkbox products. It providesits own low-level node-based interface for performing mathematicaloperations, particle and mesh queries and a lot more.
Installer Size: 48.21 MB
Download Links : Krakatoa MY v2.6.0 + Crack