Foam Particles Not Conforming to Ocean Surface After Export

[ben_williams1]

Hi,

I'm trying to export a section of ocean from the Stormy Sea Phoenix tutorial. Everything looks great in the scene, but when I export the foam particles as an Alembic file and bring it back into a new scene with a VRay Proxy the foam particles are flat and don't conform to the ocean surface anymore.

I've tried a few different export options and really hit a wall with this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[georgi.zhekov]

Hello,

The alembic particles aren't aware of the ocean displacement as this is something that is handled internally by the Particle Shader and the Phoenix Simulator.

Why do you export the particles as Alembic? Maybe we can suggest an alternive approach?

Thanks!

[ben_williams1]

Hi Georgi,

Thanks for the quick reply. The reason I'm trying to export the particles as Alembic is to bring them into Blender. I'm in a small team of 27 developers and we now have more Blender users than Max. I want to get the team using more Phoenix assets in our ouput, but I need a pipeple to get simulations from Max to Blender. Clouds and smoke were easy to move over as VDB files, and even the Liquid seems fine for the most part.

The bit I'm currently stuck on is getting foam particles to look correct in Blender. I made a few gometry node setups that were not aware of the ocean displacment and then I came back into max to see if it was a problem with the Alembic file.

So I suppose the question is, how can I get this Ocean scene over to Blender?

I tried a TyFlow approch to export foam as geometry, but this didn't work. Although that could be user error on my part.

Thanks,
Ben

[zdravko_pavlov1]

Hi Ben,

I can confirm that tyFlow reads and exports the particle positions before the displacement is applied.

I was able to load the foam particles into tyflow and export them both as PRT and ABC:
https://gyazo.com/17280e9371439d86c7a25ead98872aed

The video capture above is made using the "stormy sea" Phoenix preset and it has a small amount of displacement.

However, as I mentioned, the displacement is not taken into account when the particles are taken outside Phoenix, and with stronger values, there is quite a noticeable misalignment:
https://gyazo.com/15e7c59425e3aedb8359ef6ec3729cb8

The surface, though, is exported WITH the displacement applied.
https://gyazo.com/434e497db8256ab5a66d499f3f27b9c4

So this is something that we might look into. The solution, for now, might be to export without displacement and handle it in your target application for both the surface and the particles.
Or, use the Fade Above Velocity settings, which lowers the displacement where the liquid is moving more turbulently. That's where the foam appears anyway.

Regards,
Zdravko

[ben_williams1]

Hi Zdravko,

Thanks for your help, very clear explaination. Glad to know I'm not doing something wrong.

I'm wondering if it might be possible to adjust the exported foam particles to follow the surface of the exported liquid mesh by modifying their Z axis position. I'll have a think and maybe find a solution. If you have any ideas please let me know.

Thanks,
Ben