I just saw the great news about UnrealEngine finally getting great real fluids and not just “mipmap fluids” animations So I got this thought that it maybe would be possible to import alembic from Blender into UnrealEngine? I dont have any knowlegde of fluids at all, so it would be a great opportunity to get into it. I did my Googling and found this:
I´m a bit skeptic to be honest. I´m playing with fluids and alembic from time to time in a non realtime environment. Alembic either stores the whole mesh per frame! or a volume where later a mesh in the renderer or engine has to be created. To get half decent looking fluids the data amount is enormous. We´re speaking about something between some hundred MB up to several GB per frame. For very low res fluids it might work, like the one shown in the reddit post. But they look terrible The step to make it look a bit better is huge. Actually It would be interresting for some special cases. Maybe a fountain or a waterfall where you only use like 5 frames or something that either reapeat or play in a random order. Btw. if you want to play with fluids get the Houdini free PLE.
Is a fluid animation you made in Blender or other 3D app, can be water smoke or what you want cloth etc all the baked animations can be exported, but mainly is a list of meshes stored that changes over the time, don’t affect other objects in the world.
I’ve made some liquid test’s with blender 2.78 alembic export. It looking nice with high resolution.
…this short alembic cache take 355 Mb for example:
So I got this thought that it maybe would be possible to import alembic from Blender into UnrealEngine? I dont have any knowlegde of fluids at all, so it would be a great opportunity to get into it. I did my Googling and found this: