CGTalk - Piles and piles of Particles

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wmaness

12-16-2002, 03:57 AM

Hello,

I was directed to this forum from Renderosity. I'm trying to create a fairly simple animation of a large stream of coal, landing on a house and nearly burying it. The problem is similar to sand heaping up at the bottom of an hourglass.

I've tried the superspray emitter, metaparticles to try and get them to "heap up" but it looks nothing like sand or coal piles, (actually looks much more like doggy do than anything)

Any suggestions would be most welcome.

- Bill

Lousy before and after shots of what I'm trying to accomplish...
http://www.powersat.com/images/library/House_large.jpg
http://www.powersat.com/images/library/HouseCoal_large.jpg

erilaz

12-16-2002, 04:29 AM

Hmmm... I'd be more inclined to try using reactor. Might be a bit cpu/memory hungry though! Are you using max 5?

BrandonD

12-16-2002, 07:18 AM

Here's the problem. Particles (in any of the main 3d packages) are infinitely small and do not contain any mass. For that reason, they will not pile up on each other. Fluid Dynamics treats the particle stream as a homogenous medium and IS capable of piling up, but trust me, that's not the approach you need. I would go with Erilaz's suggestion of using rigid-body dynamics to pile coal objects. Another approach would be to use instanced geometry with particles and create an invisible "deflector" object that your particles could react to.

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