A Spiritual Successor: Exocortex Fury
After Frantic, I founded
Exocortex
and helped build
Exocortex Fury
, a GPU-driven spiritual successor to Krakatoa.
Fury focused on real-time rendering of millions of particles with depth of field, motion blur, self-shadowing, and stereo rendering.
It integrated with Softimage and Maya and found strong adoption in parts of the VFX industry.
The core idea lived on: specialized particle rendering could unlock visuals that general-purpose renderers struggled to deliver.
What This Story Taught Me
1. Start with a real pain
Krakatoa began as a production necessity
The problem was urgent and concrete
That made the first version easy to validate
2. Design for the workload
Billions of points changed the architecture
General-purpose tools were not enough
A focused renderer beat generic solutions
3. Great tools keep evolving
Others extended Krakatoa after I left
The core concept survived multiple generations
The tool's legacy now includes open source