RealFlow Particle Exporter (PE)

Owned by thomas (Unlicensed)
Last updated: 05 Sept, 2014
2 min read

Cinema 4D provides two different particle systems: Thinking Particles and the “standard” system. Thinking Particles is rule-based and can be connected to Cinema 4D's XPresso system to create complex simulations. Interfaces to Python and COFFEE open a wide variety of possibilities. The standard system, on the other hand, consists of several elements, e.g. an emitter, a gravity object, wind, and a deflector for simulating collisions, and a few more nodes. When you work with the standard system you add “objects” to the viewport, and adjust them to your needs. Thinking Particles use a visual programming environment embedded in the XPresso editor. Here, different nodes are connected to make the particles behave in a certain way.

Despite these fundamental differences, there is one thing both systems have in common: first and foremost they create particles. And these particles can be exported to RealFlow as a sequence of BIN files. There, you can import the files and use them as an initial state, for example.


If you want to learn how to work with these particles systems please take a look at Cinema 4D's manuals. The information, given here, only covers the data exchange between Cinema 4D and RealFlow.

Limitations

There are no limitations in terms of an emitter's number of particles – BIN files are capable of storing several million particles. With the particles' properties it is different. Cinema 4D's standard particle system does not work with physical attributes, such as pressure, density or vorticity, to name but a few. Most of the channel data, which is written by RealFlow, simply does not exist for this particle system. Even velocity is not calculated and stored with the particles – at least not by default. The only channel that really exists is age.

Thinking Particles have channels for velocity, age, and mass. Other channels can be inherited from the Thinking Particles system, but are not calculated by default, unless there is an appropriate graph/node group to simulate the particles' pressure, temperature, density etc.

Furthermore, the particles do not belong to a certain fluid type, e.g. “Liquid” or “Dumb”. Cinema 4D's particles can be considered a class of their own, but when they are exported you have to assign a fluid type in the exporter plugin.