Exporting to other renderers - Mesh, Motion Blur, Foam, etc

[Emcs07]

Hello everyone, I am currently researching liquid simulators and I've been a VRay user for quite a while so I watched some PhoenixFD videos and frankly they looked pretty amazing. I am completely new at this so please be patient.

I have downloaded the demo but for the life of me I can't find where the export as mesh options are. I intend to render the PhoenixFD sims in other renderers (possibly Arnold or Renderman) so I want to try this out. I also want to understand once the mesh is exported how these packages can then understand motion blur + foam + splashes and so on. I have read some people use the motion vector pass but I understand this is not ideal for accurate and nice looking motion blur.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Eduardo

[Ivaylo Katev]

you can render water with other renderers directly in 3ds max (without export) using the "render as mesh" option.
but if you want to export the mesh for some reason, just enable the "view as mesh" option in the preview panel and this will allow phoenix to behave as standard max mesh object. you can export it using any export mechanism working for the default geometry.
in vray you can use native rendertime motion blur, otherwise motion blur in post. actually it's probably to have motion blur with other renderers, never tried that, but if they use the same mechanism (build the mesh twice with small time difference) it should work.
the splash and foam are renderable outside vray but with less quality, without natural reflection and refraction, only environment mapping.

[Emcs07]

Thank you for your response Ivaylo (by the way, your vimeo demos are beautiful). I forgot to mention I am a Maya user, I don't think Maya has the render as mesh option, although I will search for it. For motion blur in post the motion vector pass from VRay is needed, correct? And I also have to check whether the renderers support motion blur through the method you described.

Splash and foam are probably best left to render in VRay (atmospheric pass if I understand correctly?) and then compose in post.

Regards,
Eduardo

[ivaylo.ivanov]

The Maya version doesn't have demo with this feature yet. I guess we can make the motion blur to work for the liquids, but there is no way to render foam and splashes with other renderers.

[Emcs07]

The Maya version doesn't have demo with this feature yet. I guess we can make the motion blur to work for the liquids, but there is no way to render foam and splashes with other renderers.

Does the non-demo version of PhoenixFD for Maya have "render as mesh" (without export) to render with other renderers? And once I do that is it possible to afterwards also render a foam and splash pass directly from VRay?

Regards,
Eduardo

[Emcs07]

I forgot to also add to my previous post, in the demo version of PhoenixFD for Maya is exporting enabled in any way?

Regards,
Eduardo

[ivaylo.ivanov]

Technically Phoenix for Maya support only VRay. It doesn't support directly other renderers. The nightly builds support creating standard Maya mesh which can be recognized by any renderer. Phoenix can also create standard Maya particle system from foam/splashes (but not the demo) which again, can be recognized by any renderer. I'm not sure what you mean by export; other renderers will just read the mesh/particle system and export them to their scene format. They will not need the cache files, these are used only with VRay.