Dynamic Particles & MoGraph: Exporting your Simulation as an Alembic File

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  • Duration: 02:43
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Exporting your Simulation as an Alembic File, to Other 3D Applications.

If you know what an “Alembic” (.abc) file is, then you surely know how flexible it is for exchanging your Cinema 4D animations with other 3rd Party 3D applications. If you don’t know, please visit www.alembic.io, or Search for “what is an Alembic file” on the internet.

This video, shows you the “secret” of how to export Dynamic Object Streams, Generated by Particle emitters, to the Alembic format.

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Transcript

If you don't know what an Alembic file is, alembic, then you might as well pause this video or skip it altogether. And when you find out what an Alembic file is, please come back and follow this tutorial. So if you want to find out what it is, you can always go to Google or your favorite search engine on the interweb and type, "What is the Alembic File" that has an extension ".abc." Anyway, for all of you that are in the know, here's how we export this configuration to Alembic. Because there's a little bit of a tricky situation, so I'm going to rewind, press play, and you can see that we have our cloner set up with a dynamics tag and the emitter, and this also works for thinking particles. Now, if I scrub, you see that doesn't work properly because I haven't added my Mograph cache, bake it, wait for merely a few seconds, and then we can scrub properly. Excellent, now, anyone that has done any exporting using Alembic, you would assume that because we are using an emitter or a thinking particle's emitter, in the other situation, to emit these capsules, that if we go to Save, Export, Alembic ABC and press Save. All we have to do is say, either particle or particle geometry and so forth, but that will not work. The reason that will not work is the following. What the cloner generates are not particles and are not particle geometry. They are plain geometry because a cloner only generates geometry. Now, here is the problem. That when we are exporting this, each capsule is a different object, and we need to consolidate them into one object. In order to do that we need to make sure that the Merge Generated option is selected. That's the only thing you need to be aware of. So, If I press OK now, and I export it. I'm going to go and open it, and I get this, press OK. And now, if you rewind and press play, you will see that my clones have been saved properly and they are one object. Okay, they are not separate objects, so that's all you need to remember. Generate merged objects.
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