EC - Preview

Previews are an easy, but very effective way to control simulations in terms of fluid behaviour or object velocity and overall appearance. With large scenes it is not possible to reach real-time playback and therefore it is necessary to record the viewport frame by frame. You have the possibility to record frames during playback for assembling them with an external tool or create a movie directly out of RealFlow.

Image sequence (*)

This can be seen as the classic method of creating previews: during playback, RealFlow captures the active viewport window with each frame and writes the content to disk. Under “Options” you can choose the desired image format. Simply double-click on “tga” to get a list with all available formats.

Maxwell Scene (*.mxs)

When you use the Maxwell Render engine, instead of the OpenGL renderer, for your previews you also have the opportunity of saving a Maxwell scene file and opening it in Maxwell Studio or any other application which is capable of reading MXS files. There you can make further adjustments and combine your scene with other elements.

Arnold scene (*.ass)

This is the scene description format of Solid Angel's Arnold render engine. You can export simulation data to native ASS files for direct use inside Arnold.

Video preview movie (*.avi)/(*. mov)

The individual preview images (from “Create preview”) can also be exported as movies. With Windows, the clips will be saved in AVI format, with OS X the MOV format is supported. You can choose from the codecs which are available on your computer; RealFlow does not provide any codecs.

Video preview frames (*.png)

By default, previews that have been triggered with the “Create preview” command from the “Menu Bar” are written as individual files in PNG format. With the OpenGL renderer you will see a 1:1 copy of the active viewport including all its elements (grid, screen captions etc.). With the Maxwell Render engine it is possible to write out a rendered image sequence. With this feature you can also use textures, shaders and materials with your RealFlow nodes, enable motion blur and use some of the RealFlow RenderKit features, for example the “MultiPoint” option.

Video channels 

RealFlow's implementation of Maxwell Render lets you several channels with your render. If you want to activate this feature just switch the appropriate channel from “off” to the EXR image format. The channel data is only stored with a Maxwell preview (Playback > Maxwell preview). When you do a single render with the “FIRE” engine, channels will not be calculated.