3ds Max Settings

With Krakatoa installed, you are ready to start rendering your particles… ALMOST.

For your "protection", 3ds Max has set certain limits to keep processing times within reasonable limits. Krakatoa handles particles differently, so some of these defaults should be changed to less restrictive settings. As you work with Krakatoa, you will need to make adjustments in these areas:

• Time Configuration

In general, particle systems compute rather slowly. In order to preview frame-by-frame behavior in the viewport, turn off Real Time.

• PF Source – Particle Amount: Upper Limit

By default, particle systems are set to a maximum of 100,000 particles. This keeps your scene within reasonable memory and processing limits when rendering with the 3ds Max scanline renderer. However, with Krakatoa, you will often require significantly larger volumes to obtain fine detail in your rendering. Consider manually pushing this setting to 5,000,000 or even 10,000,000.

Krakatoa provides an option to automatically or manually set the System Limit of all Particle Flow emitters in the scene to 100 million. It is enabled by default and can be found in the Preferences rollout of the Krakatoa GUI.

Warning: the 3ds Max default Upper Limit was set to protect users from overloading system resources. By setting the limit higher, you must remain aware of your particle system design relative to your computer configuration. Your actual maximum particle count is constrained by your available memory. See System Requirements for memory usage calculations.

• PF Source - Quantity Multiplier: Viewport Percentage

By default, any Quantity Multipliers will be set to 50% Viewport and 100% Rendering. Since you are going to push the limits of Particle Flow in most cases, it is a good idea to reduce the Viewport percentage to a much lower value to avoid displaying millions of particles in the viewports. For example, setting Viewport % to 0.1 and Render % to 100.0 when generating 1 million particles will calculate and display only 1000 particles in the Viewport, but 1 million in Krakatoa.

Also note that setting the Visible % in the Display operator to less than 100.0% is not the same as changing the Viewport Quantity Multiplier - in the former case, all 1 million particles will be processed but only a smaller percentage will be drawn in the viewport, while in the latter case only 1000 particles will be processed and drawn, reducing calculation times significantly while tweaking the scene outside of Krakatoa.

• PF Source – Integration Step

By default, the Integration Step settings for Viewport and Render are set to Frame and Half Frame, respectively. These settings control the frequency at which particle events are calculated. As you move toward your final rendering with Krakatoa, consider setting The Integration Step for Render to a smaller step size. Be advised that small settings can dramatically increase calculation time.