CFD Simulations - OpenFOAM to Unreal Engine

Development Pipeline & Plugins
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1

Hi,

I’m looking at the possiblities to export CFD simulations from OpenFOAM software into Unreal Engine.
I understand as of UE 5.3 it now supports OpenVDB file format but I don’t think it’s possible to export / save to .VDB from OpenFOAM.

Does anyone have an experience or knowledge in doing this?

Thanks in advanced!

2

Hello, i’m looking for the same thing. Did you find a solution?

3

Try to use Paraview.

It can import OpenFOAM and Ansys contents. For VDB side, there is a volumetric rendering support and some talks about its forum.

On the other hand, you can export USDZ file and import it to UE.

Personally I prefer USDZ because current UE VDB implementation doesn’t support runtime import and this prevent product creation.

1 Like
4

Thanks I’ll give this a go

5

Hello! I’ve encountered the same issue. Do you find the solution? Could you provide me with some ideas?

6

There is no out of the box solution for that.

  • Use ParaView to convert OpenFoam based volume data to VDB and import it to UE in editor (doesn’t work on runtime)

  • Use ParaView to convert OpenFoam based volume data to USDZ. You can import it on runtime but you have to use source code version of UE5 because you need to force enable something which I don’t remember in .target.cs and it works only with source code version.

  • On the other hand, you can try to export all particle locations and re-create them with Niagara or even you can try ray marching but there is no tutorial about these and they will be extremely hard operations to do.