Smoothing mesh normals for export to other applictations

[wslfx]

Hey All!

Currently I'm almost a month in now, trying to accomplish something inside houdini as a complete newbie. I was hoping there would be someone out here that has the knowledge to help me out a bit. Every tip is a helpful one for me at this stage entering the amazing world of houdini!

So this is what I'm trying to accomplish. I'm trying to simulate a logo inside a big bath full of chocolate that slowly sinks down and drowns in the thick, viscous fluid. I got everything set up with an ocean source, narrow band particle sim and got everything cached. It looks pretty fine, until I continue to the meshing part. I've already spent quite some time trying to get to know the particle meshing tools inside of houdini, and for this case the best one turns out to be the workflow using the VDB toolset (since It gives me the most flicker free results). It get's pretty smooth as well, and I can give it a final smooth using a normals node, followed by a attribute blur that blurs out the point normals. Now comes the part where I'm getting stuck: I'd like to export this to another 3D application. In this case Cinema 4D. But unfortunately, I can't seem to figure out a way to transfer over these smoothed normals to an alembic file. What could I do to render out the pretty result in cinema, like I'm getting in houdini? 

 

Thanks a bunch in advance guys! I already learned A LOT from all the crazy talented people on this forum, so thanks a ton for that already.

 

Stay safe,

Edited June 23, 2020 by wslfx

[micro88]

Not much help to the OP but I am also trying to find a soloution to keeping attribute blur in an alembic output?

[flcc]

If you use point normals its probably the problem.
C4d doesn't read prim or point normal from Alembic.
To get your pretty normals into C4d you need to promote these Point Normals to vertice normals.

 

Edited January 6, 2022 by flcc