How to bake ICE particles / strands?

[pdesopo]

Hi all,

need to export ICE animation (particles and strands) to 3ds Max. I thought this should have been pretty common by now and I was searching around, I've found Bake Ice UVs but I guess it's just related to UVs, not particle / strands simulation.
I know there's a "send to" link from SI to Max but it doesn't actually bake particles geometry, am I right?

Thanks for any hints.

P.S. I've heard of Alembic, no idea if this is already available whether what's possible to export.

[Bullit]

The "send to" sends the particles to Max as a particle flow object. I don't know if the instance object goes but if you send points , planes, boxes, spheres it respect that. You can also then change stuff in particle flow.

[pdesopo]

Hm... it doesn't seem to work here. I get the particle flow and particles seem to be in the right position but that's it, no strands, no geometry.
I thought there was a way to bake ice particles like for instance exporting Realflow simulation or bake Mograph animation. Just a obj sequence would be already great to allow other softwares (not only AD family) to import that.

[grahamef]

Strands can't be transferred, unfortunately. I don't know whether Particle Flow supports arrays of positions per particle, but the nCache format definitely does not.

http://download.autodesk.com/global/doc ... =d30e89154

[Bullit]

Your best bet is probably Alembic by http://www.exocortex.com/, ask them if it export strands.

Why do you need to export for Max?

[pdesopo]

Because we're working on a project and everything is being handled and produced within 3ds Max. Now we need some particle stuff and the best solution seems to be SI+Ice, as long as we can find a way to transfer that to Max, that doesn't sound really doable right now...

[dwigfor]

Could you use Ice Modelling / Extrude along strand to create real geometry, and then bake/transfer that via FBX?

[pdesopo]

Could you use Ice Modelling / Extrude along strand to create real geometry, and then bake/transfer that via FBX?

This one?
viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1456

That sounds really promising!
Thank you for the hint dwigfor.

[Tekano]

and then if the polygon count is changing and you want to cache that in Softimage you can see this thread https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgr ... w237d7DSbI

To transferto Max I don't think the PC2 format can handle changing polygon count and maybe FBX could but would not give much hope certainly Alembic would be able to do this transfer to Max