Itoo Software Forum

Forest Pack => Forest Pro (*) => Topic started by: mindmedicine on June 23, 2018, 12:15:50 PM

Title: Alembic particles and curves support?
Post by: mindmedicine on June 23, 2018, 12:15:50 PM
Hi,

I just saw the new features for ForestPro: A great update! RC and FP have always been some of my favorite tools in 3DSMax.

Since 3DSMax has very limited alembic import that does not support instancing, particles or (animated) curves,... Right now Vray-proxies are the best and only way to import Alembic files to be rendered with Vray. But the functionality of the Vray-proxy in that aspect is still very limited:  i.e. It's Particle mode is limited to spheres or dots, UV-support for particles and curves is non-existing or pretty limited.

If the distribution modes paths and particles would support paths/curves and particles coming from Alembic-files exported from Houdini or other DCC.
Then this could become one of the few remaining missing links between Houdini and 3DSMax/Vray (or other render-engines) to control and render instances with the speed, power, elegance and ease of use of Forestpack and Railclone?.

Would this be doable and something to consider?
Title: Re: Alembic particles and curves support?
Post by: iToo on June 25, 2018, 12:01:38 PM
Hi, thanks for your suggestion.

We have not experience using Alembic, but this feature has been commented by other users.
I guess it would be problematic to use Alembic path/curves in Forest, because we use several spline functions which are provided by Max.

But Alembic particles should be doable, since the interface to PFlow is easier to replicate with other particle systems. Of course, first we must study how Alembic works.
I've added it to our wishlist.
Title: Re: Alembic particles and curves support?
Post by: joconnell on June 27, 2018, 07:51:11 PM
This'd be a really useful feature for our studio - we're running a lot of different softwares for environment creation and sometimes have to swap between them for rendering / interaction / shadows and so on - it'd be great to have alembic as a support for forest and it'd be even better to have it export to alembic too with ID and transform data so we could bring it out! I know there's xml export built in but this'd be very handy if you're already putting in support - we don't have forest in every one of our bases and it's far more powerful than the other options - it'd be great to be able to layout in max and easily export for other non windows applications!