Thinkbox Software Releases Stand-Alone High-Volume Particle Renderer, Krakatoa SR

Previously available for Autodesk 3ds Max and Autodesk Maya 3D software, Krakatoa is CPU-based, optimized, multi-threaded, and can be used on most hardware running Windows or Linux operating systems, including laptops and render nodes, without dedicated high-end graphics accelerators. Krakatoa SR exposes both a Python-based interface and a C++ API to connect to various professional 3D applications such as The Foundry's Nuke or Side Effects Software's Houdini.

Key features of Krakatoa SR 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
• Support for both additive and volumetric shading models at the same time, 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
• Particle loading of Krakatoa .PRT file sequences, RealFlow .BIN file sequences and .CSV file sequences, with the ability to offset, retime, combine and modify already cached particles
• Procedural particle creation from polygon mesh volumes and mathematical algorithms
• Particle repopulation for render-time conversion of low-count simulations into high-count particle clouds

"We want artists to be able to deploy our tools in any way they can possibly imagine," said Chris Bond, founder, Thinkbox Software. "Krakatoa SR enables even more applications to leverage our software's powerful volumetric particle rendering capabilities and we're eager to see what our clients produce once they start adopting it."

Krakatoa SR is compatible with the network rendering licenses used by the other Krakatoa implementations (Krakatoa MX and Krakatoa MY).

Image courtesy of Anatomical Travelogue