Mountain of Madness
Film/TV

The new RBD Material Fracture SOP (version 4.0), combined with a custom Guided Cluster Activation setup in Houdini, makes it easy to create a highly controllable, large-scale mountain landslide.

This project covers the full process: procedurally isolating the collapsing cliff from the main mountain geometry, slicing it into optimized clusters to run separate RBD fracturing on each part, and activating the destruction in natural, staggered waves.

It also showcases a custom subnetwork designed to automatically eliminate unshared edges both before and after the simulation, and includes setups for secondary elements like debris, dust, and sand trails. Finally, the entire setup is configured with RBD procedural caching and rendering inside LOPs (Solaris).

I was solely responsible for the FX on this project. For those wondering about the cliff environment, I was provided this asset, which was generated by Hydra Studios (https://www.sidefx.com/hydra-studios/).

(2 responses)

Asset Type
Scene File | HIP
Published
July 31, 2026
Terms of Use
Standard License
Created in
Houdini 22
Verified in
Houdini 22
Categories
Destruction FX , Karma
Mountain_of_Madness.zip [725.3 MB]

COMMENTS

  • darylatkins 1 week, 3 days ago  | 

    Hi there,
    This looks great but the initial Falls_LOD1_V018.bgeo doesn't load (possibly corrupt?)
    Latest - 22.0.249

    • qiruil@sidefx.com 1 week ago  | 

      Hi there,
      Thanks for letting me know! The .bgeo file is included in the zip archive and uses relative paths ($HIP). To load it correctly, please make sure to extract the zip completely and open the .hip file directly from the extracted folder, or use File > Set Project to point to that directory.
      That should resolve the issue right away! Let me know if you're still having any trouble.

      • darylatkins 6 days, 6 hours ago  | 

        Hey, thanks for the reply.
        Yes I tried both of those things originally on the fully extracted project.. Im also locating the .bgeo asset directly.
        Its there but never cooks even in a fresh load in a new project. So it felt like perhaps it became corrupted in the zip?

        • dmitriiv 6 days, 2 hours ago  | 

          Hey darylatkins! After trying on a couple machines, the unzipped bgeo from archive works just fine on our end. Could you please share more details what exactly are you seeing on your side? Are there any errors popping out? Have you tried on different 22 builds? What is your OS? Thank you!

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