Bowl of cooked pasta

#1

Hello,

I’ve been trying to create a large bowl of cooked fusilli (spiral-shaped pasta) which means a couple hundred complex soft bodies. I’ve had some success using both Maya soft bodies and Realflow layering 10-15 pieces in at a time, and converting them to passive rigid bodies before doing the next layer. This isn’t really accurate, though, and in both cases it starts running into a wall (either slowing to a crawl or freezing up or ignoring collisions) with the bowl about 40% full.

I’m wondering if I should attempt to do it with the Bullet Physics plug-in- but all the documentation and examples about soft bodies are variations on sheets of cloth.

Has anyone used Bullet for a large quantity of Soft Bodies? Are there any other solutions I should consider?

Thanks for any ideas!

Doug

#2

Depending on whether you want a static or a dynamic scene, you might have some success with nHair.
Every piece of pasta could be a short piece of hair with vertex collision and a large collision offset that almost encapsulates the whole geometry.

Vertex collision should be much more robust and efficient than full surface and should be enough of an approximation.

If you run into visually overlapping meshes, you can always use deformers after the simulation to fix them.

#3

this is tailor made for DMM in Maya or the Houdini FEM solver. You would get the flex and compression of the pasta and could tweak the material properties to give real world results.

#4

Thanks, guys, for those suggestions.

Out of curiosity I ran a test in Bullet, and once I got the lay of land with the settings, it is working really well. I have about 300 pieces dropping, colliding and deforming simultaneously.

And even with all that, it sims much, much faster than the aforementioned solutions.

Cheers!

#5

the tradeoff of course is in collision accuracy, if your ok with that Bullet in Maya would be a good solution. Id be interested in seeing the results too post if you can please

#6

I’ve attached a fusilli sim that took about half an hour to setup with nCloth. In this particular case I’m simulating the full fusilli mesh, but to make it more efficient it would be good to instead simulate on flat(yet twisting) strips then thicken them downstream of the nCloth with an extrude.

I made the model by starting with a plane, then did detach on all its verts, selected all the faces and scaled the components to make them flat. Then I did an extrude with rotation and divisions which created all the fusilli, keeping everything just one mesh. Divisions were kept low for faster simulation. Then I made this nCloth and set the self collision to full surface and increased the nucleus substeps to better resolve the collisions. The output cloth mesh has smoothing to make it look better.

#7

Nice one D! :smiley: