Using RealFlow simulations in Carrara

[molaram]

I wanted to share my experience about rendering RealFlow 4 animated scenes in Carrara. NextLimit (company making RealFlow) is making plugins specific for programs to import RealFlow scenes. As there are no special plugins written for Carrara i found another way to use the animated scenes in Carrara.

In the export options of RealFlow you can choose to export scene as mesh sequence frame by frame. So for each frame of your animation, RealFlow produces a new obj or lwo (or else) mesh. When you import all these objects (for example 25 objects for 1 sec. animation) disabling the auto position selection, you have all the animation in one frame. After this, what you should do is just use the Visible selection and for each frame just make one object visible in order.

This method does not take too long to setup and the results are amazing. I'm not a programmer but someone who can write codes can easily write a plugin doing this automaticly i think.

[Piem]

Hello
I have downloaded Real Flow 4 demo..I don't install it yet because of my work..and the full featured demo time is 15days..But I can't wait to test it in Maxwell~R ,Shade and Carrara

Ohhh man ..I can't wait.

[molaram]

You will really enjoy after getting grips on

[markbremmer]

Healthy price tag. :-/

[Narration]

Originally Posted by markbremmer

Healthy price tag. :-/

Indeed. Interesting other matters you can look at from the Next Limit forums also - I looked in on Maxwell forum.

I found an interesting set of videos making a splashing water logo using RealFlow and Maya:

http://www.digitaltutors.com/digital...ails.php?v=707

Quite a lot of interest at least to me who had seen neither, about how other parts of the 3D world live.

Kind regards,
Narration

[whkguamusa]

Blender has a fluid sym that will work the same way with Carrara.
I asked one of the developers if he could whip up an importer that would set the on/off keyframes for the sequence of obj files into Carrara.
Its been a while and I forgot all about it.

I hate getting old

wayne k
guam usa

[markbremmer]

I didn't realize Blender had a fluid system. I'm checking that out now. Still have the name of the developer.

Mark

[Cyborg Commando]

@whkguamusa
Can you please explain more about how to use blender fluids in carrara?
I used this tutorial to make a simple fluid animation, but I have no idea how
to export from blender and import to carrara.

[markbremmer]

Hi Cyborg,

I've been playing with this myself. After you've baked the animation, select the fluid and then go to the File pull-down menu and choose Export. For the export option select, Wavefront.obj and choose the options Selected Object, and Animation. It writes multiple .obj files that you import into Carrara and keyframe their visibility. It's a little bit of tedious work.

Additionally, I discovered that the 2.42a build of Blender had a bug in the .obj export function and it wouldn't write files correctly. To get this to work, I've downloaded the latest Beta build and everything worked fine.

One last thing, unless you increase the fidelity of the fluid mesh, it comes into Carrara pretty chunky. For each instance of the .obj, I converted the model in the vertex room, smoothed it and then enabled the dynamic subdivision.

It's pretty cool to see the fluids splashing around in Carrara though...

[Cyborg Commando]

Thank you markbremmer,
Im glad to see there is a way to import the fluids to every program out there.

[Butch]

So is this working?
Can we contact RealFlow and explain maybe how this would take a small amount of time to do a plugin for Carrera?

[Butch]

Seems that they just released a plugin for Lightwave.
I dont see any reason why the hell not for Carrara!

[markbremmer]

I wouldn't hold my breath Butch. Lightwave is used by many cinema and TV studios with the budgets that go along with such production. The RealFlow software is $2700 U.S. Most folks that buy Carrara may not be interested in a $2700 plug-in the way a production studio is since those studios can actually recover a $2700 expense in a single project.

However, we may be more likely to get a plug-in for Blender which does some pretty good fluids itself for the simple reason that Blender is Free and much more accessible to a wider range of users.

[Butch]

Blender does fluids?

[molaram]

A plugin just for handling object sequences would just do well for most 3rd party fluid simulators and think its not much complicated to do...