Krakatoa Renderer GUI

 Available in Krakatoa v1.0.0 and higher

This chapter documents the rollouts found in the Krakatoa Renderer GUI which provides the renderer with its settings.

'Manage Krakatoa GUI Rollouts' Rollout

This topic documents the features of the rollout used to manage the visibility and docked/floated state of the rollouts listed below. This rollout is the only one which is locked to the Primary Floater of the Krakatoa Renderer GUI and cannot be hidden, floated or docked to the Secondary Floater. It also lets you save and load custom UI configurations, for example a setup just for rendering, a setup just for saving particles and so on.

'Presets and History' Rollout

This topic documents the Presets and History rollout's features. This rollout is used to save, load, manage, browse and compare Presets and History records containing information about the Krakatoa Renderer GUI settings at the time of the Preset or History file creation. It also provides thumbnails and full-blown render output samples to analyze the visual results from different renderer settings, as well as additional information about the scene like filenames, scene content, render/save times, memory usage and so on.

'Global Render Values' Rollout

This topic documents the features of the Global Render Values rollout which lets you override at render time the background color and some renderer-specific Particle Data Channels like Color, Emission, Absorption and Density. It also lets you create and run sets of Global Krakatoa Channels Modifiers to override all Particle Data Channels cached by the renderer including Normals, Position, Velocity etc.

'Shader Parameters' Rollout

This topic documents the features of the dynamically generated Shader Parameters rollout which exposes properties of the Phase Function used to control the light scattering behavior at render time.

'Main Controls' Rollout

This topic documents the features of the Main Controls rollout, the central point of Krakatoa render controls.

'Save Particles' Rollout

This topic documents the features of the Save Particles rollout which is used to define the output file name and path to save particle file sequences to, as well as the channels to be saved in these files.

'Partitioning' Rollout

This topic documents the features of the Partitioning rollout which is used to define the number of partitions, the particle data to be randomized in each partition and the Deadline settings if using the Deadline Network Manager to perform the partitioning. It also provides the functions to process one or more partitions locally or to submit to Deadline, if installed.

'Memory Channels' Rollout

This topic documents the features of the Memory Channels rollout which provides and overview of the channels currently requested by enabled Krakatoa features, the per-particle memory usage, the cached state of the various channels and the current cache load. It also provides an option to pre-allocate memory to speed up loading when the final particle count is not known (esp. when using Krakatoa procedural particle generators like the PRT Volume object.)

'Matte Objects' Rollout

This topic documents the features of the Matte Objects rollout which is used to define the Named Selection Sets of geometry objects to appear as stand-ins for geometry from other renderers. These objects can cast shadows onto particles and occlude particles behind them, allowing the compositing of Krakatoa rendered passes with the output of other renderers.

'Ambient PME' Rollout

This topic documents the features of the Ambient Participating Medium Extinction rollout which can be used to simulate the light extinction as it passes through a medium like air or water while not interacting with particle clouds. This can be useful when rendering particles submerged in another medium, e.g. silt in water or dust in the air.