Animations made with the importer:
RealFlow Fluid simulation
RealFlow is the award winning fluid simulator from Next Limit Technologies that incorporates both rigid and soft body dynamics. Rhino geometry can be imported into RealFlow using the lightwave exporter option (*.lwo) with triangle-only meshes. With this plugin it is now possible to import RealFlow solutions back into Rhino.
RealFlow is a particle engine that is capable of encapsulating particle streams with surface meshes. This importer can read both particle and mesh data from RealFlow caches. This plugin is not a typical import plugin because it reads animations rather than single files. You will not find the *.bin file format added to the Rhino importer list.
After you load the plugin, the _RealFlowImporter command becomes available. This command asks you to select a set of *.bin files. RealFlow exports its particle and mesh data to different file types, but both are named *.bin. If you select more than one file the importer will limit itself to that subset of the animation. After you have defined the frame-set, the Solution Browser dialog will appear:
Note that the command is no longer active at this point. You can run other commands to your hearts content while this dialog is visible. The dialog consists of the following elements:
Particle mode buttons
If you have selected one or more particle frames, these two buttons control the display type of the particles. Particles can either be drawn as little spheres or as motion trails. If you are improrting RealFlow mesh data, these two buttons have no effect.
RealFlow particles displayed as spheres and trails...
Palette picker
RealFlow data often comes with additional properties such as pressure, velocity or temperature. You can adjust the colour of the particles or the mesh by switching to one of these display modes. If the data you have requested is not available in a specific frame, the colour defaults to a very pretty orange.
RealFlow mesh displayed with a constant palette and a velocity palette...
Frame control buttons
These buttons allow you to move to adjacent frames or to preview the entire animation. Press the Play button again to pause the animation. Note that the display of particles during a Play/Pause preview is superior to regular scrolling. Additional steps are taken to ensure that particle display order is optimized for the current camera location. During scrolling mode these optimizations are not active to ensure a speedy redraw.
Record sequence
Similar to the Play/Pause button, except it exports the viewport frames as bitmaps. Note that this operation cannot be cancelled at present. Once you start a Recording you are committed to it.
Bake Geometry
Inserts the current frame as a Rhino object. Either a pointcloud, a group of lines or a mesh depending on settings.
Timeline slider
Allows for quick setting of frame numbers. If you are importing solution with many particles or large meshes this will not be smooth. Because the total amount of data exported by "RealFlow"" is potentially many times the available amount of memory, frames are not cached. Rather, each time you view a frame it will be read from the harddrive. Performance will benefit greatly if you have no other applications running at the same time that require extensive harddisk usage.