Exporting a Traces Animation to Showcase

[Anonymous]

Currently we use Flex 2016 to obtain our CFD results and then export them to Showcase along with the original Revit model where we can enhance the aesthetics of the model. However, in order to improve the results further we were looking for animation as the next step and in particular, animation of traces.

Now I do realise that this feature already exists in Flex 2016 but the animation only shows the bare blocks of the geometry! Does a feature exist, where these traces of results can be exported into a Showcase model? And if not, is this sort of feature ever likely to exist in the near future?

[Jon.Wilde]

Hi Matt,

I was talking to one of our Maya/Max guys about this the other day (he is called Florian, I'll ask him to check in on this thread for you). I do not think the vbx supports what you are after.

Have you tried giving materials to the model in CFD? Does that give you anything better?

Thanks,

Jon

[Anonymous]

Hi Jon,

I have just tried giving that a go now, I must admit, I didn't realise you could apply textures to the volumes!

However, after building a model and attempting a traces video, the quality simply isn't comparable to what you can achieve in showcase 😞 Also I thought that the FilmBox (.fbx) file format allowed the storage of motion?

[Florian.Coenen · Accepted solution]

Hello,

as far as I understand you have some streamlines / airflow lines within CFD and want to bring them into Showcase for visualization.

Basically you are right, that fbx can store animations as well, but unfortunately the fbx from CFD can only bring in static lines  (exported a cylinders) into Showcase.

But there is one trick you can do to do a look-alike animation in Showcase, which is only working with Open GL and not with Raytracing. The keypoints are:

1.: Import the streams into Showcase as FBX. The streams will be static

2.: create Cross-Section Planes in order to cut the stream objects

3.: animate the Cross-Sections

See here the workflow within a screencast video that I have done.

http://autode.sk/1SEZ6Wl

I hope that is a bit helpful.

Best Regards,

[Anonymous]

Hi Florian,

Thanks for your response. Yes, I remember seeing a youtube video of someone doing something similar with streamlines on showcase and it worked quite well. However, unfortunately this method relies on the streamlines only acting in one direction 😞 The streamlines we wish to do this on are within a complex scenario and move in all sorts of directions which would be problematic.

I will likely end up attempting to create a manual export process myself for this so can I ask, why can't Flex export animations? Is this simply because of the way the add-in was programmed?

[Anonymous]

Matthew,

Have you seen any progress in this area? I'm in the same situation you describe here so I'm hoping this has gotten some dev love in the last two years?