Animating Liquids and Gases

I have used the animation tools in Pro/E in the past. Now I have to make animations showing liquids and gases flowing through various assemblies. I also have been asked to make an animation showing "crosslinking" of polymers at a molecular level. I know that pro/E is not the best tool for these type of animations. What other softwares are out there for this kind of job? If you have used these, what level of training do you recommend?


Thanks in advance for your reply.


BPT

Maya is the best and compatible with ProE as well. You will have to take basic training of Maya but it has so many modules. Dynamics mdule will be better for you.


Israr

Hi Israr..


Which kind of exported files are you using during the exporting in PROE Wildfire2.0 to other Design Program like Alias Maya? Which file isright for great quality of polygonialmesh. AsI know the Maya do not understand the basic dimensions of importedmodel but I have only basic experiences in Alias Maya6.5.. Iwas looking for some good method forexporting assembly or simple model tothe Alias Maya, but without good result. I have read that PROE WF 2.0have support for Maya files but which file it exactly is? As we know theMaya is great in rendering (Pixel Shader 2.5, Maya7 alreadyhave support of shader 3.0, Mental ray and so on...)


Did you try it?Does anybody know which kind of file is welcome by Alias Maya after exporting from PROE?....STL,DXF,IGES,Shrinkwrap or what?


Thaks.. With regards


Michal

Hi Miko,


Maya, with the aid of "direct connect" allows you to open ProE native files directly in Maya. in the company whereI work we use Proe and Maya extensively and often use native ProE files but have found Step files (for surfaces) tobe quite good.


WF also asthe capabilities of creating *.obj files - (wavefront) similar to STL..These only work for Solid models and can be quite large- with a UV map the colour/texture comes into Maya (from what I can remember) also but needs to be reapplied because of a loss of quality.


I also would highly recomend Maya - not thateasy tho'!


James

Maya as 'the best' I hardly think so, you can't just singularly say that as there are many factors to consider.

To be fair, there are ways to do things and it really depends on how you want to get there.

Size of assemblies and software costs and learning curve are some of many considerations because just buying rendering software doesn't make you good at it.

I've written a couple of articles on it in profiles and hdri magazines.

If you want something easier to deal with but low learning curve and not super concerned with photorealism (only because the application is more geared for documentation) you could try immersive design's IPA product (immdesign.com) because it handles the translation in the background. I only half heartedly recommend this.

The preferrred way I recommend people to wet appetites and get the ball rolling is to get a 3rd party translator tool (ala Polytrans) and look at the possibilities of 3rd party tools for rendering.

- Carrara Pro
- trueSpace
- Lightwave
- Cinema 4D
- XSI
- Maya

I've somewhat listed these in the order of easy to use / price. My recommendation of applications to review first are Lightwave and Cinema4D. Lightwave because it is cost effective, and with a tranlator easy to get objects with heirarchy across. Cinema4D because it can handle large polycount assemblies well and similar to LW easy to get objects with heirarchy across with a translator.

I got me a Carrara license a few weeks back and yeah obj or wavefront seems to give the best result .. for solids. Acis, (.sat) seemed to work best for surfaces. Maya directconnect did faile oftenwith large assemblies.


Regards,


Nick

MAYA is so much better than all the others. Cinima 4d is not even in a category with Maya.

design-engine said:

MAYA is so much better than all the others. Cinima 4d is not even in a category with Maya.

Click to expand...

That's laughable. It's a matter of opinion. You can debate this until you're blue in the face and it's an argument that can't be won by any sides. You have to pick the tools that suits you and that matches the job. Not any one tool is the best for everything.

I've used maya, and for dealing with product graphics and getting stuff done fast with handling translations and large data sets, it didn't cut it. It's a clunky UI, and if you want to spend the time customizing I suppose you can eventually mold it to your liking but I'd rather spend time using the software.

The more friendly apps dealing with getting geometry from CAD systems are 3DS, Lightwave and C4D. I've not done enough with XSI yet but it's doable and I'd like to use it more because it handles large datasets well.