C4D to Blender animated mesh

Hey guys,

I've been playing with Otomo's method of using blender fluids in C4D via an OBJ export and xpresso setup, but I'm struggling now to work out a way to use C4D meshes as the collider objects.

I'd like to do my initial animation in C4D, export out animated proxy objects from there into Blender to use as colliders for the fluid sim, then just export the liquid mesh back to C4D in obj format (which should match up exactly with my original C4D animation).

I can't work out how to get any sort of animated mesh coming out of C4D and into Blender, but if/when I do, I imagine that it needs to have PLA or some sort of continuous nature to it to allow the fluid sim to work properly.

Has anyone done this before successfully?

you would have to bake the animation

I'm happy to do that, but could you elaborate on that at all?

How should I export from C4D? Using riptide pro's obj sequence export? Or is there a better way that permits PLA?

How should I then import into Blender, since I can't see a multi-frame/sequence import option...

Any advice would be much appreciated!

Thanks for the reply.

I'm able to export an obj sequence via riptide pro demo, but blender doesn't seem to be able to open an obj sequence (even the batch import just sits on a static frame).

Is this the best way to go about it or is there a better method?

Thanks!

Fbx? Collada?

I've tried FBX and Collada - neither of them seem to want to import animation - only stills.

Unless I'm exporting them incorrectly? How specifically would I 'bake' an animation? Do you mean bake down to PLA or so? Currently it's just a box (made editable) rotating and moving.

Problem solved!

In case anyone comes in here looking for the answer, I spoke to Otomo via email and he kindly explained that the problem lies in the .dae file being exported incorrectly from C4D.

I hope Otomo doesn't mind me quoting his email, I just don't want other people to waste the time I did on such a stupid problem.

Open up the .dae in a text editor and change:

<library animation>
<animation>
<animation>
data
<animation>
<animation>
data
<animation>
<animation>
<library animation>

to this:

<library animation>
<animation>
data
<animation>
<animation>
data
<animation>
<library animation>

The fps must also be the same in both c4d and blender.

I see that you got Collada working, but I'm curious if you got any further with importing the .obj sequence? I'm not versed with Blender (the interface was too alien to suit me when I looked at it a few yeas ago), so I don't know what options might be available.

Anyway, I actually based the file name sequencing ("xxxxx_000000.obj", "xxxxx_000001.obj", etc) on some example files exported from Blender, so it's a little odd that it can't import them (of course Riptide Pro can't Import sequences - yet - either, but that's a different story...).

Keith

It all comes down to what the .obj importer of Blender supports and what not. It seems that it doesnt allow for animated .obj sequences. It allows export of sequences, but not import.

Inconsistency? I call it "Open Source". ;-)

But even if you are able to get your sequence into Blender, it would be a mess to set up all the imported objects for the fluidsim. If not impossible.

Ahh, thanks. I figured that they'd have sequence import support by now - I guess my development schedule with Riptide Pro is not as far behind as I thought .

Well I'm not out of the woods yet. Even after doing a function->bake on the animation, the collada exported .dae seems to get disrupted somewhere because when I look at it in blender it is a little jerky at the start and end of the animation.

Thus when I export the .obj sequence back into C4D via the xpresso setup it doesn't match the original setup - it's offset slightly from the original mesh at points by about 5-10%. It's not a timing thing since it can't be corrected by animation offsetting.

There are already about 10 work arounds that I'm employing to get it this far, has anyone got a solution to this issue?

Hi!
dear Otomo
i tested the your pipeline BlenderFluid-Cinema4d, is very impressive!
But i am Leopard10.5.5/Macos user, and ReplaceInFile work in Win only,
is possible on Mac? How i can assign the material to Xref FluidContainer?
Sorry for my english!
many thanks

I have to update the blog I guess. The ReplacerinFile Step is not longer used. You can modify the exporter script which comes with Blender to prevent the assignment of null materials.

open the "export_obj.py" file in the blender directory with a texteditor. search for the two lines starting with " file.write('usemtl ". Put a # in front of these lines, which will hinder them from executing.

when you export the obj files now there will be no material anymore on the objects in cinema 4d, which makes the assignment of your own materials possible.

many thanks, Otomo!

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