Alembic Export Support
Exporting to the Alembic (.abc) cache can be useful for archiving simulation data or for submitting jobs to render farms that do not support the FLIP Fluids addon.
- How to export to an Alembic (.abc) cache
- Alembic export for use in other software
- Rendering Alembic Whitewater
The FLIP Fluids simulation meshes can be exported through the Blender topbar with Blender > File > Export > Alembic (.abc).
Tip: Often you will only want the simulation surface or whitewater meshes exported and to ignore the other scene objects. This can be done by selecting the objects you want exported and enabling Only Selected Objects in the Alembic Export Settings.
There are known issues in Blender that can affect Alembic export of simulation meshes. The FLIP Fluids addon will automatically initialize the Blend file and simulation meshes to work around these issues:
- To prevent crashes during Alembic export in Blender 2.81 or later, the Blender interface must be locked (Blender > Render > Lock Interface). This option is automatically set by default when creating a new FLIP Fluids Domain object.
- To have Blender correctly identify the simulation mesh objects as animated meshes for export, a modifier is required to be placed on the object (any modifier should work). The addon will automatically place a smooth modifier with zero smoothing on the fluid surface and whitewater objects upon initializing the meshes.
The resulting Alembic cache after export works well for importing back into Blender, but we cannot guarantee that this will work for importing into other software that use different standards for how the Alembic cache is structured. However, many users have had success in exporting a FLIP Fluids simulation to Alembic for use in other software.
A common problem with exporting FLIP Fluids whitewater meshes is that some third-party softwares cannot import this data properly. The Blender Alembic exporter does not support exporting particles or instances, so whitewater simulation meshes are structured as vertex-only meshes where each vertex represents the position of a whitewater particle. Some softwares do not recognize vertex-only meshes as valid geometry.
If you would like to test Alembic export using the FLIP Fluids addon in your workflow, try our free demo.
When rendering a FLIP Fluids simulation, the addon will automatically set up whitewater rendering by instancing icosphere particles (or another object) over the mesh vertices. An important note for rendering the Alembic whitewater cache is that you will need to set up the particle instancing manually since the addon does not have control over these objects. The whitewater Alembic meshes are vertex-only meshes where each vertex represents the location of a particle.
Blender Documentation for how to instance particles over an object vertices can be found here: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/scene_layout/object/properties/instancing/verts.html
In Blender 3.1, vertex meshes can be converted to a new Point Cloud object type which greatly improves render efficiency in both render time and resource requirements. See the Domain Attributes > Whitewater Point Clouds topic for more information.