Phoenix FD Mesh Export

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Good luck! In maya the help has not been updated since the last release and it's not connected with help buttons from the interface, so you can check the max help instead - but not everything is there too - we are preparing a new help that is completely up-to-date, but it's not online yet.

[9k_JHT]

Found a solution using alembic. Posting a video I made here to help out anyone that might need to do this.

https://youtu.be/aYFKzXGLrdA

WOOOO!

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Sweet! GJ

[Underscore]

Hello, fairly new around here and saw that this thread was kinda based on my question. I have a small sim of just goo comming out og a sphere and falling to the floor making a puddle and I wish to export it from 3ds max and get it into the game engine Unity 3D. So the alembic sulution does not really work seeing as alembic is not a real time friendly format and there for not supported in Unity. Is there any way of getting the sim baked to a normal object that can be exported with the FBX or OBJ exporter? Ive tried just directly exporting the Phoenix sim object to an FBX and that just turns up as nothing on the other end, wheter it be in max or in unity. Ive tried using the mesher compound object in max used to make particles into meshes, this gived me a mesh on the other end but only the single "frame" my timeline indicator was at when I exported. In both cases the FBX exporter does not fully understand what it is exporting and just converts it into a static editable mesh object. So is there any hope out there? Help is greatly apriciated!

[Paul Oblomov]

Use crate

[Underscore]

You will have to excuse my lack of knowledge, but do you think you could elaborate? Is this a feature in max? Or is it a 3rd party plugin you download/buy?

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey,

Paul means the Exocortex Crate alembic exporter, but you said this wouldn't do the job for Unity, so we'll check what's up with the FBX export and get back to you.

Cheers!

[wxyz]

How about using the 3rd party plugin Frost?

[Underscore]

Frost made by thinkbox? Is it just to send them an email to get accsess or is there a payment involved in this aswell? If it is just a freeware thing i'd be willing to try but I am not sure I want to spend too much money on a method unless I know it works since this is for a non-profit piece of student work.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey, back with some info - so the first step to exporting the Phoenix liquid as a mesh is to turn on Show Mesh in the Preview panel - this will mesh the current frame on the timeline to a standard 3ds max mesh and you should be able to do anything with it a max mesh supports. However, when it comes to animation, the fbx exporter seems to only support object animation in space and skinning, but not a dynamic mesh generated each frame, and the obj exporter does not do animation at all. You can lookup animation export scripts for obj and there are some, but they basically create a sequence of many obj files for each frame.

Not sure how Unity animation import works either, but what the Phoenix mesher gives you is basically a brand new mesh with a different number of polygons for each frame anyway, so you need to look into how you turn this into an animation in Unity.

Hope this comes in assistance somewhat.

Cheers!

[Syclone1]

Hello, fairly new around here and saw that this thread was kinda based on my question. I have a small sim of just goo comming out og a sphere and falling to the floor making a puddle and I wish to export it from 3ds max and get it into the game engine Unity 3D. So the alembic sulution does not really work seeing as alembic is not a real time friendly format and there for not supported in Unity. Is there any way of getting the sim baked to a normal object that can be exported with the FBX or OBJ exporter? Ive tried just directly exporting the Phoenix sim object to an FBX and that just turns up as nothing on the other end, wheter it be in max or in unity. Ive tried using the mesher compound object in max used to make particles into meshes, this gived me a mesh on the other end but only the single "frame" my timeline indicator was at when I exported. In both cases the FBX exporter does not fully understand what it is exporting and just converts it into a static editable mesh object. So is there any hope out there? Help is greatly apriciated!

I don't think you are going to get anywhere in unity with exporting deforming meshes from 3dsmax, I tried that for a month straight trying to get a simple animated hydraulic hose that bends into unity from max and ended up abandoning it and found a plugin in unity its self that I could build hoses and have them bend according to other objects positions that they were connected to. This was all with 4.x and I haven't had the time to dive in to 5.x but I assume that the same problem still exists. I would be tempted to find something in unity its self like a plugin that may do what you need it to.

-dave

[wxyz]

I'm going to try conforming a plane to the Frost object to get to Unity

[wxyz]

Will the liquid solver put out id channels in the latest nightly?

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Doesn't it now?

[wxyz]

Need to use the legacy solver to put out prt's for Frost