KRAKATOA™ MX is Thinkbox Software’s production-proven Volumetric Particle Rendering, Manipulation and Management Toolkit for Autodesk 3ds Max.

It provides a pipeline for acquiring, caching, transforming, modifying, deforming, culling, shading and rendering vast quantities of particles at unprecedented speed to represent natural phenomena like dust, smoke, silt, ocean surface foam, plasma and even solid objects. Krakatoa™ integrates well with Particle Flow, the flexible 3ds Max built-in Event-Driven Particle System, and provides data exchange capabilities for sharing particles with other 3D and simulation applications.

The rendering features include Particle and Voxel representation of the same data, support for shading and texturing using standard 3ds Max maps and materials; Particle Self-Shadowing and Shadow Casting from and onto matte objects; support for per-particle Scatter, Emission, Absorption and Density data, Various Light Scattering models incl. Isotropic, Phong Surface, Schlick and Henyey-Greenstein, Kajiya-Kay and Marschner; Environment Reflections; Motion Blur and Depth Of Field effects; Ambient Participating Medium Extinction and more.

The Particle Manipulation pipeline includes Particle Culling using arbitrary geometry and Particle Deformations using 3ds Max deformation modifiers and Space Warps like Bend, Twist, PathDeform and Free Form Deformation lattices; Particle Retiming using custom graphs, offset and limit range behaviors; Particle Data Channels access via a powerful node-based MagmaFlow editor; read and write access to particle data via MAXScript