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Recently found out apparently I have to "bake" an animation that uses fluids, before I can actually render it. However, I need to have the 'baked' fluids built into the blender file, but it doesn't seem to be a way to do that (I am using version 2.79).

Google searching/etc/etc - some people seem to give a 'hint' as to a workaround - which somehow involves exporting the fluid animation into something called shape keys for the vertices of the fluid animation - OR - exporting each frame as a new mesh object, then re-importing it - and then rendering that. However, since it is just a 'hint' - I don't exactly get how I would do that (and I've tried various things).

How would I accomplish this? I am including a very basic blender example file where I have a domain for the fluid, and then smoke fluid on a cube mesh.

Thanks very much!

user6262902
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  • For fluids, look into alembic Caches. You can export your simulation as. abc sequence and import them with a geometry cache modifyer on a proxy object (a cube for example). – yann Feb 03 '18 at 14:26
  • Thanks - I actually was - but don't "get" how to do that (in some ways I am still very new to blender). Could you please provide a step by step example? I see the .abc export sequence in the file->export, but don't get exactly what/how I am supposed to export. Using the example .blend file I have, could you help me? Thanks very much! – user6262902 Feb 03 '18 at 14:29
  • pps, been trying to play around with this, and still can't figure it out. I bake the fluid dynamics, select the cube, export to .abc, then I add another cube to the scene, select it, select the modifer (mesh cache sequence modifier - since mesh cache only seems to accept .mdd or .pc2 files), - so I use the mesh cache sequence modifer, but if I click 'apply', I get an error saying "Modifier is disabled. Skipping Apply", so assuming that doesn't work)... any ideas on how to get it to work? thanks! – user6262902 Feb 03 '18 at 15:46
  • You only need to export the fluid sim if you want to use it outside of blender. You can automate the fluid bake with python, once it is baked blender will use the cached sim data when rendering. – sambler Feb 10 '18 at 00:16
  • thanks. I figured it out. none of the answers really answered what I needed to do, but I figured it out on my own. – user6262902 Feb 11 '18 at 20:58

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