Krakatoa Factory and User-Defined Startup Defaults

• 1 Krakatoa Factory and User-Defined Startup Defaults
  • 1.1 Introduction
  • 1.2 The Defaults Sub-Systems
    • 1.2.1 Factory Defaults
    • 1.2.2 User-Defined Startup Defaults
    • 1.2.3 Value Presets
    • 1.2.4 GUI Presets
    • 1.2.5 History Records
    • 1.2.6 3ds Max Render Presets

Introduction

The Krakatoa User Interface contains a large number of values and options that can affect the render output.
Frantic Films Software has spent a significant amount of time figuring out the best default settings of each one of them to allow for quick iterations when starting a new scene
Still, every user has different needs and preferences and it would not be possible to satisfy the preferences of every single customer.
For that reason, Krakatoa provides a multitude of different methods to define both the initial settings and save and load settings later in the rendering process.

The Defaults Sub-Systems

Factory Defaults

• When assigned via the Render Scene Dialog > Assign Renderer dialog, a new instance of the Krakatoa renderer will be created. This renderer will have all its settings initialized to what is known as "Factory Defaults". *These Factory Defaults are hard-coded in the file KrakatoaGUI.ms and could be potentially changed by the end user, but this is discouraged because a future update of Krakatoa would remove such changes.
• When launched via the Krakatoa GUI icon while a different renderer is active, the user will be prompted about loading the last known Krakatoa settings from a 3ds Max Render Preset or using the Factory Defaults. Selecting the NO option is identical to assigning the renderer manually via the Render Scene Dialog.
• The Factory Defaults have been set to the minimum necessary options enabled. For example, lighting, motion blur and depth of field will be turned off, density will be set to volumetric and so on.

User-Defined Startup Defaults

• Krakatoa 1.0.0 provided a global option to save all current settings to a KrakatoaDefaults.ini file.
• Each time a new instance of the renderer is created, the settings from this file would be loaded to initialize the internal settings and thus override all Factory Defaults.
• This way, the user had the option to set up the complete UI of Krakatoa the way he would like to find it next time a new renderer would be assigned and save this complete setup to disk.
• Krakatoa 1.1.0 expanded on this concept by allowing each setting to be stored to the KrakatoaDefaults.ini file individually.
• By simply right-clicking a checkbutton or using the Presets menu of value spinners, the current setting of the corresponding UI control could be stored in the defaults or removed from them.

Value Presets

• For numeric values like Particle Density, Motion Blur Samples etc., Krakatoa also provides a system to store and restore value presets.
• Clicking or right-clicking the [>>] buttons opens a menu which provides the following options:
  • Add the current value to the preset list if it is not there yet
  • Load an existing value from the list
  • Remove the current value from the list if it is already there
  • Store the value as User Startup Default
  • Remove the value from the User Startup Defaults if already there

GUI Presets

• The Presets and History rollout in the Krakatoa GUI provides means to store all or a subset of the current settings of all UI controls to a Presets file.
• The number of presets files is, other than the User Startup Defaults, unlimited.
• When loading a Presets file, the user can specify which values to be loaded and which not.
• The Presets file is backwards and forward compatible - as controls come and go between versions, the Preset loading can determine which controls are valid and will load only the compatible data.
• The main drawback of this Presets system is that is requires user interaction. It is supposed to be used to store typical settings to be loaded during the work with Krakatoa, while the Factory and User-defined Startup Defaults are meant to simply initialize a fresh instance of Krakatoa.
• Note that the KrakatoaDefaults.ini stores the internal property names and their values, while the GUI Presets store the UI-level control names and their values.

History Records

• The History records are practically identical to the GUI Presets, but are created automatically each time an image is rendered or a file is saved using the Krakatoa GUI.
• The History records do not require any manual intervention to get saved and can be loaded manually just like the GUI Presets.
• In addition, the History records store useful information about the current scene, objects and the render times and memory usage.
• The Save Particles rollout provides several [H] history buttons to access information from previous sessions and allow the browsing of all save files ever used on the specific machine.

3ds Max Render Presets

• In addition to all these native systems, Krakatoa is also fully compatible with the 3ds Max Render Presets system. In fact, Krakatoa uses this system for fast saving and restoring when switching back and forth between renderers.
• The main drawback of this system is its coarse granularity - it does not provide controls to store specific controls, it is all or nothing.