rigid bodies realflow/houdini?

[Als]

I'm kind of suprised to hear that simulation in realflow is not multithreaded. Are you sure?
I haven't done lot's of rigid bodies in realflow, but it does run much much faster when there is more processors available.
I guess you need lot's of rigid bodies, can you tell more?
I've used maya rigid bodies in new versions and was nicely suprised with speed, but as you say that's with reasonable low amount of bodies. But I've also used feelings NIMA plugin and whatever I've tried it worked quit nicely and quickly. For stuff with lot's of collisions and flexibility I've used nCloth, which also works fine, so really depends what you feel rocks your boat. If you have lot's of lot's of bodies to consider, I would try to optimize never the less, and think of what you see in the shot versus what you would like to simulate... :)
For best of all test them all and maybe even use more then one technique if that would bring the benefits...
Eh, houdini...
If you are using it already, then you know, if you are not, then do you really wanna know? :wise:


Als

[alexx]

hi als,

at least a small test yesterday on another computer (mine is only one proc) only showed one processor running while doing the dynamics.

mayas rigids definitely are a laugh, if you use more than 10 objects. interpenetrations are about 100% sure, no matter what quality settings you enter in the solver.

i need a rigid system that can handle hundreds of objects with a mesh type collision.
the nima plugin is ok but lacks some features (contact data features especially). and since it is not going to be continued, not an option as well.

nCloth - i have the impression that no matter what values i use the objects never really get completely rigid.. a bit of compression is always visible. and if i up the values more and more, the speed decreases dramatically. additionally the overall speed is not really good as well with a lot of complex objects.

as mentioned: realflow is really very stable - but i was mainly interested in a speed comparison.

cheers

bigal

[Als]

Please do contact next limit, since I really think that you should be able to use more then one processor for dynamics simulation. There is an issue of number of licenses you might have for your version of realflow.

Well, I'm not sure about the maya rigid bodies why they do stuff like that, but lot's of times the setup can make huge difference, the objects need to be optimized to work right etc. so it's too much work involved, and yeah it would not be able to cope with huge polygon count.
It really is a huge need they update it as soon as possible to higher level, or even better they should take on Nima and integrate it into maya.

Ncloth might be able to work, but also again needs lot's of setup to be just right, and there is quite a lot involved, I don't know if you tried the falling coins tutorial on Duncans blog, but if you did I would figure that your scene is too complex for it.

It's a bit strange that we still strugle with rigid bodies in maya, this being 2008 version, and all, and I always have that scene from Phantom menace with engines falling apart, how they've done that then...

Sorry I couldn't help more...


Als

[jasoniversen]

does anyone here know realflow and houdini rigids? is there a big difference in calculation time? is houdini multi threaded for rigids?


Houdini's RBD is not multi-threaded, nope. Unfortunately I have not used RF's RBD so I couldn't tell you which is faster. What are you up to?

[alexx]

als:
yep.. the falling coin tutorial and others from duncan show some nice features of ncloth rigid simulation, but as always these are very very special situations.
i am just looking for a good and fast rigid body engine. whenever i have to do such animations and simulations in maya i nearly thrwo my machine out of the window- and now i am looking for a good replacement.
so realflow is already present (with 4 licenses.. so it should work), but i heard, that houdinis rigids should be great.

jasoniversen:
i am just up to finding a good solution for my repeatingly returning rigid problems :)
i would really love if maya could come up with a good solution, but my impression is that the rigid body engine even got worse since version 1.0 and not better.

cheers & thanks

alex

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