Bifrost ocean simulations into unreal engine

shrst · November 5, 2017, 7:40am

hi everyone,i need to get a boat scene in unreal engine with ocean foam splash wakes .Is it possible to import Bifrost simulation from maya ,it into the engine if so they can i know how,Is it possible through alembic export
thanks

Poet_11 · November 5, 2017, 1:09pm

If you told me a small pool of body of water (without splashes or foam), then maybe you can export the mesh and hope its under 2 gb (there’s a file size limit on alembic in unreal don’t know what sorcery would happen if you exceed it) then maybe you can import it and hope it looks OK with the low resolution.

Body of ocean is never a good idea and its impossible to get it right given the enormous file sizes and playback that will suffer loading geometry cache per frame. You can equally forget importing foam since the particle count would be astronomical to get any half decent results if it at all imports.

I would suggest using morph targets to build a high res deforming ocean surface if you really want to go that way and avoid per frame geometry cache, at least you’ll be able to import the ocean surface, then use a combination of GPU particles and some minor alembic here and there to create flying particles, the rest settle with textures and displacement.

If you have your camera pre-determined angle, then you may export the side splash particles via alembic as facing planes and apply a flipbook animation of splashes on them, that may also work in case you want to avoid GPU particles for lack of control.

shrst · November 5, 2017, 1:30pm

Poet_11:

If you told me a small pool of body of water (without splashes or foam), then maybe you can export the mesh and hope its under 2 gb (there’s a file size limit on alembic in unreal don’t know what sorcery would happen if you exceed it) then maybe you can import it and hope it looks OK with the low resolution.

Body of ocean is never a good idea and its impossible to get it right given the enormous file sizes and playback that will suffer loading geometry cache per frame. You can equally forget importing foam since the particle count would be astronomical to get any half decent results if it at all imports.

I would suggest using morph targets to build a high res deforming ocean surface if you really want to go that way and avoid per frame geometry cache, at least you’ll be able to import the ocean surface, then use a combination of GPU particles and some minor alembic here and there to create flying particles, the rest settle with textures and displacement.

If you have your camera pre-determined angle, then you may export the side splash particles via alembic as facing planes and apply a flipbook animation of splashes on them, that may also work in case you want to avoid GPU particles for lack of control.

thanks , will realflow work better then

Poet_11 · November 5, 2017, 5:30pm

In realflow I think there is a surface generator which doesn’t change vertex count (not mesh based per frame) i’m not sure if that helps in this case, you have to experiment and see. but everything else works the same way doesn’t matter if it’s realflow or bifrost or phoenix, wont be suitable.

In max we used to use dreamscape to generate a non topology changing ocean surface, Houdini ocean for Max does this just as well. It also had ‘Reactor’ which can create wakes on a surface (blender currently has something like this). Using that as a base and then adding ocean waves deformations sometimes did the trick in certain situations (even though it will still be low res for large scale scenes, but adding splashes and particles is another matter entirely.

good luck