Export Pflow Geo to Realflow

#1

Hi

I was wondering if anyone had a good way to transfer the shape instances from Pflow over to Realflow. I have tried the SD export plugin that comes with realflow. That just gives me an empty sd file. I have tried alembic using the exocortex plugin that i got it to work once but then i can’t seem to get it to work anymore.

I have also tried putting the pflows in a mesher and export the mesher. Now I am in the process of baking out the geomerty using a script. But it seems like a long winded way to do something that should be simple.

Thanks!

#2

pflow baker script to alembic

or mesher to alembic

either one of those.

#3

I tried, mesher to alembic but I had some issues with that as well. Any tips for alembic settings.

I think the issue is that my particles are scaling up and that’s causing the errors. I am going to try with small scale in the beginning rather than scaling up from zero.

#4

Got it working with alembic but heres a top tip everything needs to be quads or triangles or Realflow will just crash. As I was using fractured geometry there were a lot faces with more than 4 sides.

http://lesterbanks.com/2013/10/working-with-alembic-files-in-realflow/

#5

interesting, thanks for the tip!

#6

Wasnt so easy in the end. Triangulating helped, but for some reason saving the pflow direct to alembic was creating an unstable mesh . Reaflow kept crashing or taking a real long time to sim a single frame. It was also taking a while to make the alembic files 20-30 mins and i would get a few frames where the mesh would explode out . Perhaps I am missing another trick.

In the end i Xmeshed the pflow then saved it as Alembic. A bit of a round about way but it was quick to export and realflow is not crashing anymore. My pflow was quite simple just some fragements flying around and going back to its original shape. Dunno why it got so complicated.

#7

Oh frustration! I wasted 4 full days try to get a simple bubble motion setup >1000 simple shapes into Realflow, what a joke. Lost a gig because of it, still bitter.

Realflow really needs to work on multi shape importing, animated or not, as of now it is a PITA.

#8

Problems like this can creep up at any point in production and it’s a straight bummer :frowning:

#9

That also reminds me… XMesh caches everything to simplest render ready form, a tri mesh, which is why I suspected it worked with theXMesh to Alembic to Realfow, where as the straight Alembic to Realfow was having issues.

#10

Thanks for your input. Glad its not just me.

I wish reaflflow would just accept xmeshes and be done with it. The problem was not just with realflow though. The alembic files I was getting were not looking right in max as well. I kept getting a couple or stretched/ exploded faces. I just started using it so I am not sure where it went wrong.