Krakatoa PRT objects interoperability

[Geoff]

Hey Tyson,
First of all Thank you so much for your awsome work! 

It would be very handy if we could use others Krakatoa objects (PRT maker, Volume, Surface, etc..) as Birth source and channels update operators instead of PRT loaders only.

Also, is there a way to expose rotation and/or others custom channels within the particle interface, it could be fully used in PRT source objects to add some magma flows or to use frost with geometry intances on the fly with no need for caching first?

[tyFlow]

The ability to import other particle systems is somewhere on the long-term todo list.

As for exposing custom data...I actually wrote a tyParticleObjectExt interface that I recently sent to the FumeFX guys to do just that. If other devs want to get in on the exposing-custom-data action they can implement it too...but I don't think Krakatoa/Magma is being developed much anymore at Thinkbox after the AWS buyout. And I'm not sure how to push data up the stack to the Magma modifier myself, or if that's possible.

[Geoff]

Any chance to see at least the rotation channel added to the particle interface..?
In any case, thank you for your time Tyson!

[tyFlow]

Oh yea I think right now I'm just returning a default orientation value in the particle interface because the rotation format the IParticleObjectExt interface wants you to send out is a bit unclear (typically rotations are Quats but it wants a Point3). I'll look more into that and see what's what...

If you're trying to read the interface yourself, you an always read out the full transform instead of the rotation and then just extract the rotation. The transform I export should be complete.

[Geoff]

I’m not sure what you mean... the interface couldn’t expose an orientation channel like the one saved with the export operator?

I don’t know if your operator convert the full transform to position, scale and orientation channels or if it’s an automatic process when writing prt files, but
when I check the datas from the interface (I use a prt source and the data viewer that comes with Krakatoa)it seems that a Spin channel and an Orientation channel exist but they both return null values, whereas using the export operator, the prt file will have a working orientation channel.

It would be really great if the particle interface could expose this channel! We have all the others, we only miss the orientation

Anyway, thank you Tyson!

[Martians]

It would be really cool with PRT source support!