What Is Krakatoa?

Krakatoa is a Volumetric Point Renderer with the following major feature highlights:

• Krakatoa does not require geometric polygons per particle, instead it stores minimal data per particle enabling the processing of very high particle counts.
• Krakatoa quickly computes volumetric self-shadowing of particles and supports shadowing with matte objects.
• Through the inherent benefit of particle systems, Krakatoa can render a fine level of detail, such as tiny wisps of smoke or silt.
• Krakatoa provides interoperability with 3rd party applications through a variety of particle file formats like PRT, CSV and RealFlow BIN.

In addition, Krakatoa supports the following particle manipulation workflows:

• Krakatoa provides methods to save 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 allows rapid render iterations for relighting, density adjustments and camera placement through a memory particle cache.
• Krakatoa provides Particle Loader objects which can be used to load, transform in space, and tweak the timing and the appearance of one or more particle file sequences.
• The Particle Loader allows the user to use arbitrary closed geometry objects to define volumes to be included or excluded from rendering by culling particles early during the loading. In version 1.1.0, the particles can be culled with respect to a threshold distance to the surface and can acquire normals from the surface.
• Particle Loaders support all 3ds Max Deformation modifiers and Space Warps allowing for advanced modeling and animation techniques to be applied to already animated particles.
• Krakatoa provides specialized Particle Flow operators which can be used to load and animate particles saved from both Krakatoa and 3rd party applications.
• Krakatoa ships with tools to analyze the content of particle sequences, generate charts of particle counts and usage and report missing files.
• Krakatoa is exposed to MAXScript, giving advanced users ways to develop additional tools to simplify their workflow. In addition, the complete Krakatoa User Interface is implemented in MAXScript and is provided unprotected, allowing further pipeline customization.