HELP! Flip Fluid UV Alembic Export Trouble.

[Lpenciu]

Hello! First time posting. I'm new to Houdini, this is my first project that I decided to do. But I'm a fairly seasoned C4D 3D generalist so I know what I want to do in Houdini, I just don't know how to go about it. 

I'm in Houdini 17.5. Here is the problem. I have stumbled around in Houdini and made a Viscous Flip Fluid Sim. I made a Sphere an emitter, and emitted my fluid pouring onto a .OBJ mesh that I imported in. I've cached the particle FLIP Particle simin the DOP network, the Particle Fluid Compressed Cached, and Particle Fluid Surface Cached.

Now here is my problem. I exported my meshed sim as an alembic from a ROP_Alembic node. Imported into C4D. And then I realized I have a UV problem. 

This is a Redshift texture and shading pass that I did with my sequence. At the time I forgot to plug in the velocity data tags from the Alembic sequence into the Redshift motion vector blur, so if it looks weird, that is why.

Crystal_Goo_Test.mov

My texture smudges are on the mesh, but they stay static while the mesh animates. It looks just like the textures from this cartoon it doesn't move with it.

 

So after a bit of digging I realize I don't even have UV's. Because Flip Fluids don't come with UV's, and if I never defined any UV's then how could they just magically appear? lol. So I tried researching how to generate them, and how to export them with the alembic. But for my specific situation I couldn't find anything that was up to date and worked. OR I am too much of a noob to implement what I saw in forum posts. The stuff I saw was for Houdini version 13, 14.5 and 16. I'm on 17.5.

Here is a screen shot of how I tried to generate UV's and export them, again I never re-cached my sim yet. I just tried to put uv's on my existing set up.

 

Below is my emitter. And there are no UV's on this sphere primitive, nor anywhere before the output. I took a shot in the dark and tried to see if I could generate them after all my caches (because it took 3 days to cache the fluid surface mesh). So I honestly have no idea where to generate these uv's, how to do it correctly, and how to get them passed onto the fluid mesh for alembic export and texturing in C4D Redshift.

I'm including my .hip file with my cache's disconnected. They are over 200 GB's all together so it's too big to include here. Lower the substeps in the Flip Solver or lessen the Fluid Mesher to make it play back faster. I used high settings for my final export (also I tried my best to optimize, but again I'm a noob with Houdini and have probably done things incorrectly in my set up). Crystal_Viscous_Sim.zip

The FLIP DOP cache might still need to be disconnected.

 

This is the final step of my personal project. I've done all this on my own but I'm super stuck on this UV generation and export. And once I can export this fluid mesh an an alembic sequence for C4D Redshift I will be set to render.

Thank you in advance for any feedback and/or answers. Please write out instructions very clearly for me to replicate if you don't want to provide pictures/ screenshots or .hip files.

Again what I'm trying to do is generate UV's for my Fluid Surface, and have then be able to be exported via an Alembic sequence for texturing and rendering in Redshift.

[Midasssilver]

This forum post outlines one way: https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/51796/

In addition to that, I know there's a way to inherit the uvs into the flip without using the rest field. Couldn't find that post in the time I had, but I'm sure it's on this forum or on sidefx.