The surface of any liquid simulation can be expressed as a standard polygon mesh. Automatically added to the scene whenever you create a simulation, the mesh has no polygons until the component is either solved or automatically generated for the current frame. Solving a mesh is typically the last step before rendering or exporting.
There are two types of meshes available:
- Cache Mesh is a solved, cached mesh for the entire simulation. If you want to save your simulation data to an Alembic (.abc) file, you must first generate a cached mesh.
- Dynamic Mesh is automatically generated at the current frame. Dynamic meshes are useful for previewing your work to see how much detail appears in the mesh at any one frame without having to calculate a complete mesh for the entire simulation. Dynamic meshes are also compatible with any renderer.
Select the mesh type in Simulation View window > Display Settings > Liquid Settings > Display Type. You can also select to display points, planes, spheres or custom objects.
Warning: The use of many complex objects as a mesh can create extremely large files that can cause system instability.
Procedure
To generate a cached mesh:
- Create a liquid simulation.
- In the Simulation View window > Management System Area, solve the liquid
and/or foam
components.
- In the Simulation View window > Display Settings > Liquid Settings > Display Type, select Bifrost Cache Mesh.
- In the Simulation View window > Management System Area, disable solving for the already cached liquid and foam components, and enable the mesh component
.
- Run the solver
.
The cached mesh is generated and available for export.
To generate a dynamic mesh:
- Create a liquid simulation.
- In the Simulation View window > Management System Area, solve the liquid
and/or foam
components.
- In the Simulation View window > Display Settings > Liquid Settings > Display Type, select Bifrost Dynamic Mesh.
- In the viewport, go to any frame of the simulation.
A mesh is automatically generated for that frame.