re: Wasted cores

Krakatoa for 3ds Max
2

Its true that Krakatoa is largely single-threaded. Some portions of the rendering process have been threaded, but in many situations Krakatoa ends up being I/O bound. What sort of scene are you rendering? What is the particle count, where are the particles coming from (Disk via a PRT Loader, Particle Flow, etc.). There is a bunch of profiling data that gets output to the Krakatoa log window during a render. The log window is available via the Preferences rollout in the Krakatoa GUI. See: http://software.primefocusworld.com/software/support/krakatoa/preferences.php#Log_Window. If you post these timings for the various parts of Krakatoa, I can use that information to improve the performance in places that matter most.

7

I had originally assumed you were using the particle renderer which is a little more feature filled. The voxel renderer’s main bottleneck is applying the particle filter while converting a particle into voxel data. That part is single threaded, so I assume it is the main problem. Try turning it back to 1 and see if you get more threaded goodness.

10

You should still dump out the profiling info from the log. It should have some text that looks like this:

PRG: Rendering 68159 particles.
PRG: Rendering 98 slices
STS: Section "Total": 
STS: 	Total 00h 00m 08.797s	Called 1 times	 Avg 00h 00m 08.797s
STS: Section "ParticleSorting": 
STS: 	Total 00h 00m 00.469s	Called 1 times	 Avg 00h 00m 00.469s
STS: Section "VoxelFiltering": 
STS: 	Total 00h 00m 00.776s	Called 98 times	 Avg 00h 00m 00.007s
STS: Section "VoxelSampling": 
STS: 	Total 00h 00m 06.817s	Called 96 times	 Avg 00h 00m 00.071s
STS: Section "VoxelSampling:Camera": 
STS: 	Total 00h 00m 00.000s	Called 0 times
STS: Section "VoxelSampling:Camera:Lookups": 
STS: 	Total 00h 00m 00.000s	Called 0 times
STS: Section "VoxelSampling:Camera:Calculations": 
STS: 	Total 00h 00m 00.000s	Called 0 times
STS: Section "VoxelSampling:Light": 
STS: 	Total 00h 00m 00.000s	Called 0 times
PRG: Finished rendering frame: 0

Which can be gotten after a render from the Krakatoa Log Window. You can get to that window via the Open Log Window Now button on Preferences rollout in the Krakatoa GUI. It should look like this: http://software.primefocusworld.com/software/support/krakatoa/preferences.php#Preferences