CGTalk - sand simulation is it possible?

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HornBerger

07-11-2010, 05:22 PM

hey!
i was trying to simulate sand with pflow toolbox ( a basic scene in which a spade digs sand and puts it in a bucket)... but failed miserably... i first created a noisy plane then used a physX flow with a Birth grid (i used restrict to mesh and selected my noisy plane) i used a grid size of 1.1 and shape of box with size of 1 also i changed the collision tolerance under the physX shape operator to 0.1 to allow some room for interpentration among other things.. also i increased the subframe factor to 6, enabled multi threading (2 threads) and set a safe mode calculation limit of 120 but when i cache/bake the simulation it crashes at about 10 - 12 % ( i guess to many calculations but i need a lot of particles to simulate sand!!!)... i would like to know the best approach to simulate a "stack" of sand... i have checked out some of the forums on google and most ppl have recommended realflow but i do not find any settings in real flow to simulate sand ... its fluid only kind of application in my opinion

thanks ! :)

OlegB

07-11-2010, 05:52 PM

PhysX engine is not designed for sand simulation - too many interactions between sand particles from collision tracking and collision impact point of view.

Thanks,
Oleg B.

JohnnyRandom

07-11-2010, 07:58 PM

... its fluid only kind of application in my opinion

Everything is fluid just some things have tighter bonds than others :D

HornBerger

07-11-2010, 10:11 PM

thanks for the post guys

@olegb:
:sad: i did not mean to offend toolbox... its a great set of operators :thumbsup: . Just running out of options...
PhysX engine is not designed for sand simulation
I get that... but what can?
@johnny:
so it can be simulated with realflow? sand particles do not interact with each other like fluids ... there's no viscosity or surface tension...

thanks...

JohnnyRandom

07-11-2010, 11:06 PM

I do not see why it couldn't be or at least faked convincingly.

Really you should be able to run a sime and render in krakatoa, ie just don't mesh the simulation. just use the particles.

Heck you may even be able to pull it off in fume with some ultra dense smoke, sim and pipe into pflow/tp and render in krakatoa.

I know this isn't really what you are trying to do but interesting none-the-less:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/06/sandgrains/

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