Hello !

which approach you would use to achieve such look and behavior in animation

granular/sand or snow ?



I saw sand and granular in action , but problem is, they are not wet and viscous , I need soil blobby pieces + some grain


I found that snow behaves more realistic but can I change material/shader and make snow look like a soil?



in that video you can see on 3:27 how character interacts with snow and it's more real for wet soil than granular

The simplest way is using Houdini Grain ,It has some parameters for adding clumping effects to the soils or snow.
However in the production we usually need to use a custom setup for controling velocity ,collision of particles.
for example using VEX codes inside a POP Wrangle or even using microsolvers .

But I believe you can find some good tutorials about this effect in the google

https://cmivfx.com/houdini-snow-simulations [cmivfx.com]


https://vimeo.com/158486969 [vimeo.com]


https://vimeo.com/116537286 [vimeo.com]

https://vimeo.com/115714070 [vimeo.com]

https://vimeo.com/192893553 [vimeo.com]