Amazon/AWS Makes "Krakatoa" Volumetric Renderer Open-Source

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced this week that their Krakatoa product-grade, volumetric renderer has been made open-source. AWS also open-sourced their XMesh software to optimize animated 3D geometry asset files.

Krakatoa is a volumetric renderer that runs on Windows and Linux with CPU-based rendering support. Krakatoa can be integrated into Autodesk 3Ds Max, Autodesk Maya, Cinema 4D, or used as a standalone particle renderer. Krakatoa works on both Windows and Linux.

Krakatoa and XMesh have both been part of AWS' Thinkbox artist toolset while now are made available as open-source software. Of course, Amazon hopes you'll leverage the AWS cloud for storing assets and rendering massive scenes as scale using their infrastructure.

AWS showcase how Krakatoa has already been used in production for films like Aquaman and Game of Thrones.

More details on the Krakatoa renderer being open-sourced along with XMesh can be found via the AWS blog. Krakatoa is being distributed under an Apache 2.0 license and can be found via GitHub. I'll certainly be checking out the Krakatoa fast particle renderer to see how well it could work out as another interesting CPU benchmark.