Daryl Obert shows how to get high-quality meshing from Bifrost simulations in Maya.

Maya Bifrost is a fantastic tool for creating water and other fluid simulations. There may be times, however, when you want a mesh of that simulation. Although there are a few ways that one can approach creating a mesh from a sim, high-quality meshing is a bit of a challenge. Check out this tutorial from (back then) Autodesk expert Daryl Obert who shows his workflow to mesh a Bifrost simulation of a thick substance as if it were ice cream.

Obert covers how to create high-quality meshing that has a lot of the simulation details from the sim data, and uses Open VDB to do the meshing. Obert notes that the built-in Maya Bifrost masher is great for doing things like liquids and droplets, but it doesn’t get the same quality as other methods. Obert covers some tips for changing the simulation solution to best extract mesh data too.