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- RealFlow's file format for particles and meshes is Alembic Ogawa. For deformed objects a propietary format is being used, but only temporarily. We will be moving to Alembic as soon as possible.
- When a simulation is being cached the data is written to disk. Depending on the number of particles the cache files can become very large in size.
- Cached simulations cannot be influenced anymore, e.g. through daemons or objects. If you want to do that you have to re-simulate from scratch.
- It is possible to create a preview or play, stop, and resume the simulation at any frame.
- Meshing can be done in a separate pass once the particle simulation has been finished.
- Deformers caching accepts two different approaches. Saving files with the deformation information or baking Point Level Animations on a duplicate of the deformed objects.
- Rendering from cached simulations is much faster, because all the simulation and mesh data is already existing.
- As long as you don't specify another "Cache Folder" or change a fluid's/deformer's name, existing files will be overwritten when you press "Cache Simulation | Meshes" again.
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- To avoid overlapping or overwritten data, the simulated nodes must have unique names, especially if the cache folder is being shared with other scenes.
- Cache file names will follow the this pattern: name
name_frame.ext - Objects, driven by the rigid and elastic deformer, will also have their own, individual file sequences, but in a proprietary format. We will be moving to Alembic as soon as possible.
- With rigid and elastic deformer the amount of files in your cache folder can become very large: a simulation with 100 rigid objects over 200 frames, for example, creates at least 20,000 files.
- In order to avoid writing the deformer cache files, you can bake the deformer's animation as duplicated objects with Point Level Animation. Please bear in mind that the document size will grow proportionally to the number of frames and the complexity of the deformed geometry.