[Wynott]

I have a mesh surface with some specific waves on it. I'd like to deform a sea over this mesh and or make the wake seamless with the sea surrounding it... Possible?

[JDHill]

Not by using Maxwell Sea directly, because the surface is generated purely based on the specified parameters, and has no provision for interaction with other objects in the scene -- for the level of control you're talking about, you'd need to use RealFlow itself. On the other hand, it may be that you can extract the mesh from a Maxwell Sea object in Rhino (i.e. switch it to mesh display mode, and explode it, to get the mesh), and then use some other third-party plugin (or maybe Grasshopper?) to deform it over, or blend it into, your other mesh.

[Wynott]

So is the mesh I see in Rhino the actual render mesh of the extension? I.e. exploding it and applying whatever material I'm using would give the same visual result as rendering with the extension?

[JDHill]

I can't say that it would be precisely the same, because the function used to get mesh faces from the extension does not include normals (they are calculated by Rhino) or texture coordinates (I apply a mapping that matches, as far as I am aware, what is generated by the extension at rendertime). It is as close as you'll get though, without using RealFlow.

[Wynott]

OK but generally.... So I could export the sea and then use any mesh software to dink with it. OK Good to know. Thanks Jeremy.

The extensions take longer when exporting for render and loading up Fire. If I explode them should be faster then, right?

[JDHill]

The extension effectively takes no time to export (it is basically just the values you see in the UI), and an unknown length of time during preprocessing in FIRE, for the extension to simulate the surface, and for FIRE to voxelize the generated mesh. If you explode it, then as with any mesh, export time depends on how many triangles are in the mesh, plus time for voxelization during preprocessing in FIRE. So, I really couldn't say that there is a general rule for determining which would take longer in practice, since it depends on the complexity of the mesh, and how often you restart FIRE.