Hello,

First, I'll me introduce myself briefly. I am a relatively new (2 Months) Houdini user coming from Cinema 4D and Realflow. I am currently working on a purely personal project on a rather large scale - a circa three minute full-cg short film. The film is about a plasmacannon being experimented with in a test-facility, and I have to simulate lots of fluid, but I also need to have some smoke in my scenes.

The programs I plan on using are Cinema for the animation and compositing all the 3D-Elements, Octane for Cinema to render. Initially, I wanted to use Realflow to simulate the fluid, since I am quite confident with it. However, getting into Houdini, I learned how much more flexible the fluids in Houdini are (with point attributes and that sort of flexibility). Now, I am torn between simulating the plasma with Houdini or with Realflow. I would probably get things done much quicker in Realflow, because at the moment every click in Houdini still takes some figuring out from me.

Enough babbling: my real question is whether importing Realflow particles or meshes is at all possible. In my case, I would need to simulate a slight smoke trail behind quickly flying fluid-blobs. One of my concerns would be the need to get velocity data to source the smoke properly.

I would really like to hear your Houdini-expert-opinion on this matter. Thank you very much in advance.

Kind regards,
Martin

If Realflow can kick out an .OBJ sequence then Houdini can read it in.

haven't used that workflow for ages, but realflow used to come with houdini connection plugins that allow you to import realflow native particle or mesh caches into houdini with all attributes so it should be painless