RealFlow 4 form Next Limit

RealFlow 4 is a dynamics and physics simulator, capable of simulating phenomenon such as water, gas, rigid and soft body dynamics including cloth and tearing.

RealFlow is one of those programs that batter down the limitations of today's 3D applications and computers, RealFlow is most commonly used as a liquid simulator and as a physics solver since most 3D applications can’t manage effects like realistic liquid flow out of the box.

The way RealFlow works is that it utilizes particles and the distance and relation between them to get the work done depending on how you want your liquid to look. There are 3 steps in a workflow that has anything to do with RealFlow.

1. Simulation: Particles are simulated in relation to each other and the environment.
2. Meshing: a mesh is calculated and wrapped around the particles , making then visible to the renderer.
3. Import: the generated mesh is exported to your 3D application of choice.

After simulation the scene is recalculated and a mesh is wrapped around it based on the given settings, without a mesh wrap the liquid simulation will not be visible to any renderer, after a mesh has been created for each frame, that mesh animation in imported into a 3D application where shaders are applied and then it is ready to render.

It is important to know that RealFlow is extremely heavy on the computer’s processor as well as the hard disk as it has to cache out all the particle data and then the mesh data that wraps it.
Integration:
As far as integration is concerned RealFlow used a format called .SD to communicate with a 3D application, SD stands for Scene Data and supports a wide verity of applications.

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