Friday, February 22nd, 2013 Posted by Jim Thacker

Thinkbox Software releases Krakatoa MY


Thinkbox Software has released Krakatoa MY, its new high-volume particle renderer for Maya.

The software shares the same core as Thinkbox’s existing 3ds Max renderer Krakatoa MX and the standalone Krakatoa SR, and “should produce identical, pixel-exact output given the same particle data and settings”.

According to the launch announcement, key features of Krakatoa MY include:

  • Point or voxel representation of particle data, with various filter modes, motion blur and depth of field camera effects, and HDRI render passes output to OpenEXR files
  • Simultaneous support of both additive and volumetric shading models, with per-particle control over color, emission, absorption, density and more
  • Support for various light scattering algorithms, high-quality self-shadowing and occlusions from both geometry and DTEX maps
  • Dedicated particle loader object supporting Krakatoa .PRT file sequences, RealFlow .BIN file sequences and .CSV file sequences, with the ability to offset, retime, combine and modify already cached particles
  • Dedicated PRT Volume and PRT Fractal objects inside the Maya viewports provide procedural particle creation from polygon mesh volumes and mathematical algorithms
  • Particle partitioning tools for caching multiple versions of the same simulation to combine into high-density particle clouds
  • Particle repopulation for render-time conversion of low-count simulations into high-count particle clouds

Thinkbox says that the renderer, which is CPU-based, is “highly optimized and heavily multi-threaded”, and is capable of running on laptops or render nodes “without dedicated high-end graphics accelerators”.

Krakatoa MY is available now for Windows and Linux, price $1,000. If you live in Los Angeles, Thinkbox will be showing off the software at the Autodesk User Group event at Gnomon School of Visual Effects on 28 February.

Read a full list of features in Krakatoa MY

Register for the Autodesk User Group event