[Kevron]

Hi, I have experienced some strange problems regarding rendering imported mesh files (.bin) from realflow into cinema 4d.

Nothing to fancy, exported both .bin and .mdd files. Tried first with .mmd but that was a rfmesh format that maxwell did not understand.

Tried then .bin and maxwell agreed to render the mesh. But it gave me some artifacts.

I used the latest rf plugin for c4d to import the mesh. I scaled it down (0.033) and sent it to maxwell.

I have also used rfrk for cinema, but there is a problem with a bit unstable license in Mac osx. License manager keeps shutting down after a while, so while it renders perfect with rfrk, it's too unstable for production.

I can share some files tomorrow when I am back at the office. I just wanted to check if anyone have experienced anything similar.


Regards,
Tor M

[JDHill]

I guess the first question would be: if you use the same bin file in Studio, and apply the same scale factor, do you observe similar issues? The point of checking that would be to find whether we are looking at a plugin problem, or an engine one.

[nachob]

Hi Tor,
You can also use MaxwellMesher extension, it has exactly the same settings and behavior than rfrk. So it should mesh the particles inside Maxwell at preprocessing exactly as you wish.

nachob

[Kevron]

Tried to find out why this happens, but no luck yet.

Importing the mesh in Studio and rendering there, works. But this is an animation, and studio is a bit "clunky" working with RFmeshes. Where is a particle cloud or another representation of my imported mesh? Only way to see the imported mesh is to use FIRE.

Here is a file: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1059954/LieOgH ... upport.zip
Also included five .bin files.

I also have the bug in C4D that the mesh is "kinda mirrored" when seeing it in FIRE against the mesh you see in the viewport.

But I managed to work around this by exporting the mesh as an alembic sequence. So it renders nicely now, but it would be nice to figure out what I have done wrong, or if there is a little bug somewhere.

Best,
Tor M

[JDHill]

Thanks for the files, I'll see if I can find what's happening. And I was not suggesting that you use Studio for the work -- only that you test with it, to try and see where the problem lies.

[Kevron]

Thanks for looking at it

Just give me a message if you need more information.

[JDHill]

Okay, I think I see the problem. You are trying to use the "Scale" parameter in the RF Mesh Importer object, but the corresponding RFMeshes extension has no matching slot for this -- to scale it, you should literally scale the object in the AM Coords tab instead, since the global scale of the object in Cinema is applied to the RFMeshes extension in the export. This being the case, scale is not actually the problem -- it is that the motion blur is much too strong. I think you will just need to play with reducing that value. Export of the blur value is: [Blur Length in the RF Mesh Importer] X [Motion Blur tag Strength, if present], with blur being affected at render time by the shutter value of the rendered camera. Keep in mind that this is RealFlow, not Maxwell, so the blur is just arbitrary, according to whatever is in the RF files (as opposed to being more physically-based, as with blur generated by the plugin, according to movement along Cinema's timeline).

[Kevron]

Thanks for a fast answer!

Is it not possible to render without motion blur? I thought that Motion blur is something you had to enable, but this is not the case with RF-meshes?

[JDHill]

The motion blur is determined inside of the RF files -- if you set blur strength to zero, the Maxwell plugin will interpret that as you saying you want it off, and it will disable blur in the export (you see this as the "Enable motion blur" checkbox, if you create an RFMeshes extension in Studio).

[Kevron]

Ok, thanks for your help again, its much appreciated