krak galaxy wip

Krakatoa for 3ds Max
3

This tutorial about using Krakatoa to generate Color based on a particle’s Age is similar in spirit to what you are asking. http://www.thinkboxsoftware.com/krak-magmaflow-fading-by-age/

How are your particles created? Krakatoa uses a per-particle channel called “Density” that is essentially a weight for the particle. You can use that value in a KCM to do pretty much any sort of shading you’d like.

If I understand correctly you are looking to work with a slightly different quantity that I typically call spatial density. This is based on the number of particles per unit volume (ie. the classic meaning of the word density). In areas with lots of nearby particles this is higher than areas with few scattered particles. Unfortunately Krakatoa does not have any tools for working with spatial density. If you can find tools that allow you to compute spatial density (Particle Flow Box #3 comes to mind), you can save that channel and have Krakatoa use it in shading calculations.

4

This is also a pretty good tutorial for using Krakatoa Channel Modifiers to shade particles with various inputs: http://www.thinkboxsoftware.com/krak-magmaflow-gijoe/

7

When you spawn all your particles, how do you decide where they will be placed? If you have some method of determining some sort of weighted random position for where the particle, that weight data can be passed to a Krakatoa Channel Modifier to be used to control particle color or opacity. You could write it to a map channel if you are using Particle Flow, and have the KCM read the values back for processing.

In Krakatoa opacity is related to a per-particle “Density” channel, and color is determined from a per-particle “Color” value.

10

I think you need to decrease the integration step in particleflow. It will help with the lines of bunched up particles where the linear integrator doesn’t approximate the circular motion well.