I’ve been emailed a lot for this and l decided to put down sort of notes for primarily using Nextlimit Realflow 2012 together with Autodesk Maya 2012.
The focus will be primarily for using Hybrido. Click here for a PDF on Nextlimit Hybrido.
Note – you need a lot of primary fast and large hard drive space for the simulation temporary files which will chew about 200-600+Gb depending on the resolution [higher=more space] you opt for. I use 2 x 1Tb Western Digital Black Caviar drives for drives C, D on an i7 workstation with 32Gb DDR3 RAM.
Also except you own a supercomputer computer simulation takes time, sometimes 5-10+ hours or a couple of days. Be patient for the goal. Use scripts/command line instead of GUI for quicker output when you have a final setup you wish to create/simulate. IF using Windows 7 – turn off unnecessary background services and things like Windows Aero etc. I use Windows Classic XP faithfully on my graphics workstation even though its running Windows 7 Professional version. A decent graphics card is a must – preferrably Nvidia. Hopefully Nextlimit releases a version of this software with GPU support. I use 2 x GTX560Ti with SLI.
Realflow objects map perfectly to Maya, without much or no re-scaling required,
You need to install the Realflow plugin for Maya and activate this in Maya
Maya, Window, Settings/Perferences, Plugin manager
Note – Realflow is CPU and memory demanding as shown below
Below are my quick short notes. Default object settings used unless otherwise mentioned.
1)
Drop in a domain grid. Add a gravity daemon.
Resize this to 10 x 10 x 30 ie Height x depth x width – this just makes a wider tank.
Add a Kill Volume Daemon just a big under the entire volume size of the grid domain.
From the Grid fluid menu – GFM, add a GFD – grid fluid domain
Simulate
GFD, nodem simulation, cache
2)
Drop a Grid Fluid Splash – GFS
Reset, Simulate
GFS, node, simulate, cache
3)
Disable gravity
Add Grid fluid foam
reset, yes, simulate
Cache this like in previous steps
4)
>> Meshing <<
Add particle mesh Render Kit – PMRK
Insert emmiters - splash and gridfluidemitter
Set polygon size and emitter(s) radius site to to 0.1
on node particle render kit, check display mesh on viewport, and make sure build is set to yes
reset
simulate
uncheck display mesh on viewport
set build to no
5)
Mesh foam particles
Add another particle render kit
add Grid fluid foam to it
Set polygon size and emitter(s) radius site to to 0.1
on node particle render kit 2, check display mesh on viewport, and make sure build is set to yes
reset
simulate
uncheck display mesh on viewport
set build to no
6)
Using Realflow plugin we will now bring in the meshes into Autodesk Maya or 3dS Max for rendering.
Note – with this low default resolution setting for the grid domain, after all the simulation processes above, my project file folder used space was 78Gb. If you up the grid domain resolution to say 4 million, you will possibly need about 300-700+Gb storage space for files generated mainly in the particles folder in your realflow project folder.
Screenshots:
