Coin Rain - How to? Please Help

#1

Hello everyone. I was watching this movie and i was thinking on how could i replicate such effect. I know i can’t position each coin individually, and trying to simulate this as individual rigid bodies would take forever. How, and in which software can i achieve this kind of results? Any specific techniques? I think the main goal would be to have a particle emmiter that could copy geometry, fill that with proxy low-res geometry for collision detection and a differente geometry for visualization. Can i get it without having to script anything? I’m kind of noob with this… Thanks a lot.

Inspiration video : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5u8e5v15Wo

Cheers.

#2

There would be several ways of doing this, first you need to decide if you want the objects to be 3d, or actual objects in your footage. As far as the collisions go, instanced particles wont collide only the particle points themselves are able to collide, depending on how far away your camera is from the coins, you could either use instanced particles, which would be quicker, and fake geometry collision (depending on how big the coins are) or, in if your trying to achieve something more similar to the shot you posted i would recommend RBDs of some kind.

#3

I managed to do it within houdini. I have achieved the results i wanted perfectly… Thanks anyway…

#4

Just out of curiosity did you go the RBD route?

#5

Yep… Houdini has specific nodes to create points along a surface, copy geometry to that points and then simulate them as individual rigid bodies… Pretty awesome results and no more than 15 min set up for the entire system… Apart from that Maya’s rbd solver is old and to slow… One problem i also have with maya is that it pratically freezes from the moment i set up an image plane… FPS go from 450 to 30 like at play every frame… :frowning: Since my programming skills are not advanced enough so i can write a solution i’ll stick with houdini for this particular work… :smiley:

#6

You could do this pretty easily with particles and instanced Coins, but yeah in Houdini it would be much faster and easier, especially tweaking different iterations…

#7

I wouldve used nCloth over particles, just by the fact that you have a full RB solution inside of it. You could place the coins via instancing and then convert those instances to objects. Combine them using mesh commands and then sim them in nCloth as rigid shells.
Having said that, Houdini still would be faster to set up and to sim as well.

#8

No Soup?!?! :smiley:

All depends on time, if you can afford longer sims of course Id vote ncloth :wink:
If not particles are much faster. Wont look as nice but ah well…

#9

Haha, yeah couldnt squeeze a SOuP node in this one this time :wink:

#10

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