Rhino > Blender animation > .ABC and Keyshot

Has anybody had success with going from a Rhino object (meshed), creating a deformed state of that mesh as a blender equivalent blendshape, exporting alembic and then rendering out in keyshot?

i want to animate an outsole, showing its flexible form, so my thought was to create deformations states from the same mesh object. maybe with cage edit or flow along surface. or maybe kangaroo will help me gain some of the ‘keyframes’.

just curious to see if anyone else has tried what seems, in my head, a viable pipeline. but i havent tried anything with ABC format so this’ll formulate my judgement on whether to learn some of the blender animation tools.


excuse my very simple example…

Hi @Jonathan_Hutchinson
I remember doing this some years back (although not with Keyshot as the target), using 3D Studio Max, using it to animate between “keyframes”, all derived from the same base mesh. Also Blender now has support for *.abc (since 2.78, I think), so maybe that could be a route, if you don’t have access to Max.
I’m really hoping that Alembic is on the list for Bongo 3. @marika_almgren, is this something that you are planning/considering for Bongo 3?
TIA, Jakob

@Normand - It wasn’t on the wish list but I added it.
https://mcneel.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/BO-2995

1 Like

Hej Jakob,

I had success with this - I got it to morph between a base/target surface. So more or less, rhino just acts as a kooky rigging tool for key shapes/morph states and of course the modeller in the first place to get meshes out. No doubt the CreateQuadMesh could have some part to play in a pipeline too.

Because I’m dealing with a moulded product, playing around with a target surface will only get me so far. Ultimately, I want to deform the shape but not distort. Maybe I’d be better turning it into some kind of solid body/cloth object.

I know rhino used to have a Morph Target export box from obj - I don’t know if that’s still around?

I’m trying to figure out other ways I can create deformation states. ApplyMesh and ApplyMeshUVN sound like they would be useful.

As is noted on the keyshot forums, an important thing is to tick subdivision scheme when exporting from blender. I’m not sure if if V2.8 has more options yet either. Otherwise you get odd behaviour of normals.

1 Like