Export particles sim to PFX

[Anti-Distinctlyminty]

Hi all,

I've been trying and failing for two days to get the results of a particle sim into another package. The particle cache format is documented here:

http://forums.newtek.com/showthread.php?129146-fcache-specification&p=1255059&viewfull=1#post1255059

The format is roughly:

Header Data
Particle Header Data
	Particle Position at Frame 1
	Particle Position at Frame 2
	...
	Particle Position at Frame n

As you can see the format requires data for each particle to be in sequence, which is an issue, as at each frame I can iterate over the points, but I cannot possibly know how many frames each particle lives for at some random frame.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to do this? I've tried using a shuffle CHOP to rearrange the data, but it's just too slow to be useful. 

[Anti-Distinctlyminty]

One thing that would help me a great deal, but I've not been able to find, is the ability to evaluate a channel at a certain time using Python. E.g. I want to get the position of a point at a certain frame...is this possible?