Krakatoa™ MY for Maya is a volumetric particle rendering plugin implemented using the C++ Interface to Thinkbox Software's Krakatoa renderer for Linux, Mac OSX and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
Krakatoa MY is fully integrated in the Maya User Interface. It implements various dedicated scene objects like a PRT Loader for loading particles from external file sequences, PRT Volume and PRT Surface for converting geometry volumes and surfaces to point clouds. v2.3.0 introduced support for the Magma node-based channel editing system, allowing complex operations on large numbers of particles, data acquisition from other particles and scene meshes and so on.
Krakatoa MY
Krakatoa for Autodesk Maya (also known as Krakatoa MY or KMY for short) is a volumetric particle rendering plugin inplemented using the C++ Interface to Thinkbox Software's Krakatoa renderer for Linux, Mac OSX andMicrosoft Windows operating systems.
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 via the PRT Volume object; and fractal-based distributions via thePRT Fractal object.
- Currently supported external particle file formats are Thinkbox' PRT file sequences, RealFlow BIN file sequences, and ASCII Comma-Separated Values CSV sequences.
- Krakatoa MY includes a function for saving particle data to PRT files that can be used in custom scripts. It ships with a dedicated PRT Saving/Partitioning scripted tool for generating multiple wedges of the same particle system to increase the final particle count or for sharing data with the other implementations of Krakatoa.
Rendering Options
- The Krakatoa renderer is CPU-based, highly optimized and heavily multi-threaded.
- Krakatoa's memory footprint adapts dynamically to the requested features, with a minimum memory usage of 26 bytes per particle.
- Krakatoa supports volumetric and additive particle shading and allows the mixing of the two modes.
- Krakatoa features both Particle (aka Point) rendering and Voxel rendering modes.
- Self-shadowing and shadow casting from and onto matte (holdout) geometry objects are supported, including mesh and DTEX-based holdouts.
- Krakatoa features integrated Motion Blur and Depth Of Field camera effects.
- Render-time particle multiplication allows the creation of more particles than the original source provided.
PRT Objects
- PRT Loader objects can be used to load one or more external file sequences. The PRT Loader allows for particle retiming using offset and animation curve controls.
- PRT Volume objects can be used to fill the volume of a polygon mesh with particles and provides the option to distribute particles within a range from the geometry surface.
- PRT Surface objects can be used to quickly distribute random particles on the surface of a polygon mesh.
- PRT Fractal objects can be used to create procedural fractal particle distributions based on a random seed, iterations control and several animatable parameters.
Particle Channel Modifiers
- Using dedicated Maya nodes, Krakatoa exposes several channel modifiers to perform channel data operations on any valid particle source usable by the renderer.
- These modifiers include the setting of a Float or Vector Channel to a new value, the Scaling of an existing Channel by a Scalar factor, the Copying of one Channel into another, the assigning of a Maya Material shade tree to a particle cloud, and the Repopulation of a particle system using Krakatoa's render-time particle multiplication algorithm.
- The modifiers are added, reordered and removed using a dedicated Krakatoa Modifier Editor tool accessible from the Krakatoa shelf.
- The most advanced modifier of them all is the Magma channel editor also found in Krakatoa MX in other Thinkbox products. It provides its own low-level node-based interface for performing mathematical operations, particle and mesh queries and a lot more.
| System Requirements for Krakatoa MY |
|
| Minimum |
| Software |
- Supported Maya Versions: 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016
|
| Operating Systems |
|
Hardware
|
- 2 GB RAM
- 50 Gigabytes free hard drive space
|
| Note |
- Windows 7 or 8 (64-bit only) on Intel or AMD 64-bit processors with SSE3 support; Mac OS X 10.8.5 or higher on 64-bit Intel-based Macs; 4 GB available RAM, OpenGL Graphics card supporting OpenGL 3.2, DVD ROM drive. A standard DVD installation can require up to 7 GB of hard drive space. The software must be registered for unrestricted use.
|