If you went through "Foam with Standard Particles" tutorial you might have been missing one thing: mesh creation. In this workshop you will learn how to mesh the results from this lesson.
Here is the nodes list:
1 “Particle mesh” node (not the “legacy” engine)
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Edit > Add > Mesh > Particle mesh
Nodes > ParticleMesh01 > right-click > Insert emitters > choose “Square01”
The mesh node now has an alias of “Square01” attached.
A click on the mesh node itself reveals a wide variety of settings under “Node Params”, but not all of them are relevant for a good mesh. The most important settings are located under “Mesh”.
Now click on the emitter alias and you will find two more panels: when you create a mesh, the engine puts small spheres at the particles' positions and blends them to create a coherent surface. The radius of these spheres is adjusted with the emitter-related settings:
Click on the mesh node's “Square01” alias.
Go to Field > Radius
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A very good and reliable way to start with RealFlow's “Particle mesh” is to use very similar settings for “Polygon size” and “Radius”:
Mesh > Polygon size > 0.02
Field > Radius > 0.03
Now, make one more adjustment to get a better representation of the particle cloud:
- Mesh > Weight normalization > Yes
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The mesh's borders are a little too round, and this is something that can be fixed with the entries from “Filters”:
Filters > Filter > Yes
@ Relaxation > 0.1
@ Steps > 16
Recreate the mesh
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Open “Particle Channels”.
Enable/disable the appropriate channels with “Yes” and “No”.
For the second step, the channels have to be exported with the mesh files:
Export > Export Central
Open the “PARTICLE MESHES” branch. There you will find several file formats to choose from.
BIN is the standard format and supports only a few basic channels.
ABC (Alembic) can store the entire range of channels.
MD provides the most sophisticated method, because here you can also decide which channels you want to include. Of course the channels have to be activated under “Particle Channels” before – otherwise they remain empty.
Enable “Mesh sequence (.md)” and leave “Mesh cache (.bin)” activated, because it is required by RealFlow.
Uncheck the unused channels, but leave “normal” and “texture” active in any case.
Click on “Done”.
Build Mesh Sequence
Now, the mesh sequence can be created:
- Select the “ParticleMesh01” node.
- Shelves > Mesh > Build Mesh Sequence
This action can be stopped with the Esc keythe Esc key, but it might take a short while until the process is interrupted, because the current mesh will be finished first. All files will be written to the project's “mesh” folder.
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