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What Is Krakatoa?

Krakatoa is a Volumetric Particle Rendering, Management and Manipulation Toolkit

In other words, Krakatoa is not just a particle renderer, it is also an extension to the general particle workflow including the saving, reloading into Particle Flow, loading for rendering, culling, deforming, retiming, shading and post-processing any relevant particle channels after the initial particle data generation, among others.

Here is a short overview of the main areas of Krakatoa - particle rendering, particle management and particle manipulation:

The Krakatoa Volumetric Particle Renderer

  • Krakatoa does not require geometric polygons per particle, instead it stores minimal data per particle enabling the processing of very high particle counts.
  • Krakatoa computes volumetric self-shadowing of particles and supports shadow casting from and onto geometry objects using Matte Objects and Deep Opacity Maps.
  • Through the inherent benefit of rendering particles as pixel-sized points when used in Particle Mode, Krakatoa can render a very fine level of detail, such as tiny wisps of smoke or silt.
  • Krakatoa can also represent particle systems as voxel grids at render time, producing dense results with less particles and allowing the viewer to fly through clouds of particles without seeing individual particles.
  • Krakatoa supports Standard 3ds Max materials, bitmaps and procedural maps with explicit or object space mapping, various shading modes including Isotropic, Phong Surface, Henyey-Greenstein and Schlick phase functions, Environment Reflection maps, the mixing of Additive and Volumetric shading and the calculation of light emission and attenuation with optional per-particle controls.
  • Krakatoa provides low-level access to all particle data channels via a powerful node-based editor called MagmaFlow, allowing for advanced shading and particle post-processing workflows.
  • Krakatoa supports a large variety of Render Elements, including Renderer and Shader data as well as custom data output defined via the MagmaFlow editor.
  • Krakatoa allows rapid render iterations for relighting, density adjustments and camera placement through a memory particle cache and supports accelerated previews at lower resolutions with less particles while preserving the apparent density.


Krakatoa Particle Management Features

  • Krakatoa lets you save particles from all available source to disk to combine them and reuse them later, as well as combine multiple sequences into one
  • Krakatoa provides a method for saving multiple randomized versions of the same particle system, which, when combined at render time, result in a much higher effective particle count than the host application (3ds Max) would allow.
  • Krakatoa ships with several Explorer tools designed to analyze the content of particle sequences and generate charts of particle counts and usage and report missing files; view the content of particle data channels in PRT Loaders and PRT Volumes and overview the settings of the Krakatoa renderer in a schematic form.
  • Krakatoa provides interoperability with 3rd party applications through a variety of particle file formats like PRT, CSV and RealFlow BIN.


Krakatoa Particle Manipulation Workflows

  • Krakatoa lets you load one or more particle sequences and retime the animation, transform and clone the particles in space, load only a portions of the particles defined by geometry "culling volumes", acquire normals from the culling volumes, deform the particles using 3ds Max Deformation modifiers and Space Warps, modify any data channels using Krakatoa Channel Modifiers and delete particles based on the Selection channel's Weight data.
  • Krakatoa provides a PRT Volume object which can turn a geometry volume into a particle cloud on the fly and also supports deformations and Krakatoa Channels Modifiers, allowing the tweaking of pre-saved animated particles as a post process.
  • Krakatoa provides a Krakatoa Skin Wrap WSM for transferring deformations from a "lattice" geometry object onto particles or other meshes.
  • Krakatoa provides specialized Particle Flow operators which can be used to load and animate particles saved from both Krakatoa and 3rd party applications. These Particle Flow systems can be deformed, culled and their data modified on a frame-by-frame basis, providing some unique Particle Flow workflows not previously available in 3ds Max. The Krakatoa Particle Flow operators also include a very fast Geometry-based Collision test, as well as a Geometry Lookup operator for acquiring surface data from scene objects and a Geometry test for testing whether a particle is inside or outside a volume.
  • PRT file sequences can be written using MAXScript, the built-in programming language of 3ds Max. Particle data can also be read from PRT Loader and Volume objects using MAXScript. Large portions of Krakatoa are exposed to MAXScript or even written in MAXScript, giving advanced users ways to develop additional tools to simplify their workflow or expand the shipping toolset.

Please click here for an overview of the Krakatoa Feature Set.