RealFlow test

[apu]

Hi

I wanted to share with you a test I did of an animated character and fluid simulation with real flow.

I had some problems exporting and importing, but I guess it has to do with axis orientation, couse when I export the scene to realflow from EIAS, in realflow the scene is flipped over the z axis. Also, when I import the mesh back to animator, I have to rotate it -90º in the Y axis and scale it -1 in the Z axis. I don't know why, so if anyone know why this is happening, I'd be very happy to hear any suggestion.

Becouse I was a pain in the $#% having to find out the workflow to make this work, here is how I did it, step by step:

First, open your animation in EIAS. Open the RFlow plug-in from northern lights, an link all the objects you want to export to real flow to the plug-in. Then, if you want to export a character animated with bones, link the skinned object to the plugin, turn on the green triangle, so the plug in knows that the geometry is animated thru time. Then open rflow plugin, set it to "Scene exporting" an in the field type the name you want with the extension.sd (xxxx.sd).

Then, I preview (quicktime output) the animation with drop frames unchecked, and this writes a xxxx.sd file into the EIAS socket folder. That's the file you have to open in Realflow (the program). You should have your EIAS animation inside RFlow.

Here is the part I talked about before. In realflow, my animation is flipped over the Z axis.

Then, do your simulations, build your meshes. The mesh you get from realflow, you have to put inside the EIAS socket folder (the whole "meshes" folder of your RFlow scene). Then in your original scene open the Realflow plugin, and set it to mesh import, locate the mesh you just put inside sockets folder, and there you have the mesh imported inside EIAS.

Here I noticed that my mesh was rotated and flipped over the Z axis. So I had to rotate the realflow plugin (The mesh) -90º in the Y axis, and scale it -1 in the Z axis to flip it over.

And voila!!!!, there you have your mesh!!!

Here is a test I did

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sorry, here is the video file

Chocolatetest.mov

[Ian]

That looks fantastic! Great work!

Well done figuring out the worflow,

Ian

[Tomas Egger]

Ola Carlos,

YOUR TEST IS AWESOME!!!

Realflow trick is pretty simple... you need to change the Realflow axis scene, If am I not wrong, its in the preferences, I dont remember more which one is better, Maya or Lightwave... export them and tell us please.

Thanksss

Tom

[apu]

Hi Tom, I did various tests changing the axis and it doesn't seem to change anything. There is also one issue, when I import the mesh, it's position is 0,0,0, and I have to position it manually on the Y axis, because it doen't match. This gives me tiny matching errors compared with the scene on Realflow, but this errors can become really annoying because sometimes the liquid intersects the model, it gets thru it when it shouldn't.

I'm almost there, but I've checked the frames per second, etc.. and everything seems to match. I don't know. Do you have any experience with this?

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I think I have something fixed about the inaccuracy. When it comes to importing the mesh, don't import from the mesh 0000, start with the 00001. Now it works perfect except the Y and Z axis issue.

[Tomas Egger]

Ola Carlos,

I just tested with Realflow test project, Realflow 3 was working, but Realflow 4.3.8 (current) have this axis problem.. I need to investigate more.

I didnt need to re-position in my project, only rotate Y and scale -1 in Z like you did.

And my project loads fine from mesh 0000 like first frame.

Thanksss

Tom