Plea for Modo Realflow Plugins

[Borgu]

I'm switching over slowly but surely from Lightwave to Modo. The only thing holding me back is the lack of plugin support.

I've done some tests and had some success getting Realflow data into Modo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqtsiUfmnTk). But the workflow is a mess and requires Lightwave.

Here are the issues:

1.) Modo Realflow particle import DOES NOT work with Hybrido splash and foam particles. The particles come in all garbled. My work around is to import the particles into Lightwave and then re-export them as .bin using the Lightwave plugins, but even then the axis are all messed up...inverted...so I have to do some goofy stuff to line it up with the fluid mesh. Velocity data and Motion Blur data is lost.

2.) Alembic import from Realflow doesn't work. Neither particles or mesh data are readable by Modo (or Lightwave for that matter).

3.) Fluid meshes are importable using a third party plug-in called emReader. It works pretty good, but I don't get Motion Blur data. Also the meshes created by emReader aren't recognized by Octane Render for Modo. (They are recognized by Octane Render for Lightwave).

Next Limit - Don't use the fact Modo has built-in RealFlow particle import as an excuse to not make Modo plugins, they don't really work. Not sure if the particle format has changed since Modo added the functionality or what.

[gus]

Hi Borgu,

How are you?

It is likely that Modo isn´t using the latest version of our .bin format.
We are currently working with the modo developers to ensure that particles and geometry are properly moved back and forth between the two applications, but this will be via the Alembic format.

As soon as I have some news on that I will let you know, but meanwhile I will mention to them the issue with the .bin format to see if they can do anything about it.

Thanks for the feedback.

g-)

[Borgu]

Alembic would be great, that's awesome. Thanks.

[gus]

Hi Borgu,

Alembic should be perfectly working for geometry caches. It was already last year when we released RF2013.

g-)