Realflow Maya Vray. How to blend two colors in single mesh?

[Intuition]

The old method for this was in finding the mesh weights and using them to alpha in a material or color. The particle mesher in realflow kept track of the particle colors over the mesh from two separate fluids or more.

The RF plug in used a melt shader for Mental Ray. In Lightwave it was simply called by using the weight map name.

How do we go about this in Vray shading? I'd like to use a blend material to determine the crust and hot parts of a lava flow.

I have a lighter emitter that keeps the crust on the top and a thicker more viscous emitter that is the hot center thick part of the lava flow.

Now technically I can make two separate meshes but I think a real weight using the particle color/weight on a single mesh will yield a more organic result.

Has anyone tackled this yet in Maya Vray?

Thanks for any info.

[vlado]

How do you bring the mesh into Maya? With Alembic?

Best regards,
Vlado

[Intuition]

I use the Realflow plug_ins for Maya. There is a bin mesh loader. So it is a mesh sequence in this case.

[vlado]

So how do the weights come in? As color sets on the mesh?

Best regards,
Vlado

[Intuition]

That is what I am trying to figure out at the moment. I see a "fluid weights as blind data" check box. I wonder if there is a way to hook them into a blend shader?

This is the method used in Mental Ray .....further down in the doc.

http://www.realflow.com/documentation/realflow-maya.pdf

This is the cinema4d mixing method. Method 2 is using the particle/UV weights.

http://vimeo.com/53155240

Just have to figure out how to translate that same data into Vray is all.

[vlado]

The blind data approach that they followed will not work for V-Ray right now. We would need to modify V-Ray for Maya to look for the blind data and export it. However this will take time and I really don't like the approach - we can do it if we must, but maybe there are better alternatives.

We can also modify ply2vrmesh to look for the weights and store them as vertex colors so that they are available to shaders.

If you export the RealFlow mesh to Alembic, how are the weights stored?

Best regards,
Vlado

[bazuka]

sorry to drop in, as far as i know in rf2013 u can export abc only with Hybrido meshes (FLIP solver) and im afraid as i can see there r only few info that you can store into abc -> vel, vorticity, curvature and splashity

p.s. even in 2014 same thing, only thing they added is arnold mesh export...

[vlado]

Well, then ply2vrmesh it is... will look into a way to translate the weights into color sets.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Intuition]

Ah ok, great news. Thanks Chaosgroup.