Krakatoa sytle rendering

[Maximus]

Hey guys, i have to do a personal project for some friend which is obsessed with particles, problem is i have no idea how to render them.
He wants a krakatoa style particles render, is there something out there for Softimage to produce such results? Possibly free since i think its gonna be my first and last time workin with this

Doing some test with mental ray but beside the fact it seems a bit slow, i cant get so far that look at all. Any hint or tips on how to get this look is appreciated, i'm not in a rush since its a personal thing, just tryin to figure out the best way to achieve this look with Softimage.

here is an image just to get you understand what i mean, even if i think most of you know krakatoa.

[origin]

xx millions of particles + emrpc (not free but cheap) + carefully placed lights + selfshadowing + emfluid for general movement (not free) /sometimes you can get away with just turbulence noise/
this image is probably fumefx + pflow + krakatoa

edit: you can try also free 3delight, which is pretty good for point rendering.

[owei]

Hi!
Well...high quality, free and fast will be very difficult. You will have to make a compromise. Remember, that krakatoa is a commercial plugin that is at $ 1k an up. What have you tried exactly with MR..? Did you try the volume shader? Depending on what you have tried, there might be some other possibilities..you could also post your MR tests, to get some more info ;)

cheers,
oli

[Maximus]

i'm tryin to use the ICESprite new node in render tree but for some reasons it always gives me this error

// ERROR : PHEN 0.8 error 051071: broke suspected infinite trace recursion

and doesnt render at all. I'll post some results when i get some decent look. Thanks for feedback

[Maximus]

xx millions of particles + emrpc (not free but cheap) + carefully placed lights + selfshadowing + emfluid for general movement (not free) /sometimes you can get away with just turbulence noise/
this image is probably fumefx + pflow + krakatoa

edit: you can try also free 3delight, which is pretty good for point rendering.

how you do selfshadowing on particles when they are set as points? cause i'm totally clueless, trying to add an ambient occlusion in the mix but it slows everything to death. Shadows are what i'm lackin i think.

[origin]

in mental ray? i dont know, I wouldn't try to render that amout of points with raytracer. emrpc/fury has option for selfshadowing. getting the decent look is also a matter of particle alpha (or density option in krakatoa)

[Kzin]

xx millions of particles + emrpc (not free but cheap) + carefully placed lights + selfshadowing + emfluid for general movement (not free) /sometimes you can get away with just turbulence noise/
this image is probably fumefx + pflow + krakatoa

edit: you can try also free 3delight, which is pretty good for point rendering.

how you do selfshadowing on particles when they are set as points? cause i'm totally clueless, trying to add an ambient occlusion in the mix but it slows everything to death. Shadows are what i'm lackin i think.

if you using solid objects for small particle then u should not have a problem to render these fast with ao colorbleed, best here is to use box shape, sphere for example took 10 times longer and needs 10 times more ram.
for the look you are after with your example image i would use the particle renderer node. explode that compound to get access to more options and play with the settings. of yourse you need emfluid for this because of the floating shape.

[Kzin]

in mental ray? i dont know, I wouldn't try to render that amout of points with raytracer. emrpc/fury has option for selfshadowing. getting the decent look is also a matter of particle alpha (or density option in krakatoa)

emrpc is a bit hard to control in terms of direct lighting/definition of direct lighting. i am not convinced from the (small amount!) tests i did for this particular kind of rendering.
if someone could share some tips for nice/defined lighting of it i would also be happy. ;)

[Mathaeus]

how you do selfshadowing on particles when they are set as points? cause i'm totally clueless, trying to add an ambient occlusion in the mix but it slows everything to death. Shadows are what i'm lackin i think.

If you're in 3delight, you can render separate shadow pass using a small count of larger, no-point type particles, in point-rendering pass you just call already rendered deep shadow maps, using a shadow shader. This is a way faster, too.
However, point-type has surface normal aligned to camera (at least out-of-the-box one), so
all this applies nicely to 'shading-by-self-shadowing-only' stuff, light smokes, coffee steam, so on.. which can go even without any shadow, sometimes.

However, your Krakatoa example seems to have aligned particles, or colored somehow, according to simulation, looks like Krakatoa takes care about shading too.

[ace63]

I wonder why no one suggested Fury 2 yet.
It is developed by exocortex and in open beta and pretty much does exactly these kinds of renderings, including self shadowing.

[Maximus]

hm its really a pain! cant get a decent result at all..gonna try harder but thought it would be easier-
Seems the only viable solution is Fury

http://vimeo.com/38134223

but its not even sold single, u need to buy slipstream as far as i can tell and anyway didnt mean to invest money in this hobbist project.
I need to study more, still too new at this. Never did anything like this before.
Thanks again

[Maximus]

I wonder why no one suggested Fury 2 yet.
It is developed by exocortex and in open beta and pretty much does exactly these kinds of renderings, including self shadowing.

well it costs 400$ bundled with slipstream, thats not a solution for me

[Mathaeus]

I wonder why no one suggested Fury 2 yet.
It is developed by exocortex and in open beta and pretty much does exactly these kinds of renderings, including self shadowing.

I'm not 100% sure but anyway, in this example, looks like Krakatoa takes care about *shading* too, how shading normals are aligned. If Fury can do something like, that's great.

By the way, I've been able to get nice results for "light smokes" using EmFluid + EmRPC, or EmFluid + 3delight, in short time. Motion blur in 3delight, a bit of blur in post, done...

[ace63]

Fury 2 is no longer bundled with Slipstream - I don't think they have announced a pricing yet.
Testing the beta is free - I suggest you try it out and suggest features you would like to have.

[Mathaeus]

here is test of 3delight + some Exocortex product, I *think* the shading rely on same principle as in Krakatoa test. Ciaran already posted this test here (but I don't know where it is...).