Hello!

With the previous cloth solver, setting up a sim of falling leaves or papers was straight forward and gave nice results.

Since the cloth moved to FEM solver, its very hard to get a decent result for these type of sims.

Theoretically, with normal and tangent drag with 0 0 0 offset, you should get something in the same spirit, meaning that as soon as the cloth object (leave or paper) bend a little, this should generate sliding effet and so on, but it does not.

Since the wind and fan forces dont work with FEM you can only rely on “hand made” velocity fields injected in the sim but it is not as convenient as a fan force for example with witch it was easy to animate “wind perturbations” in specific areas.

Well in short, is there a way to invoque the old cloth solver? or is there a nice workaround.

Thanx

Moin,

you don't have to use FEM for cloth-solving in 16.x or before. One workaround always is to use a straight-forward PBD setup (“grains” in Houdini).
If I remember correctly (it's quite some time that I did the research for my “everything you ever wanted to know about cloth simulations” book that I might write one day), Houdini does NOT use FEM if your object does not have any thickness. You *can* use FEM (adding “virtual thickness” to embed the tets), but you don't have to. Meaning: If you *can* use thickness-free objects to drive your simulations, you should automatically be using a hybrid or even plain PBD simulation anyway.
Docs said (again, quoting from memory, don't lynch me if I'm wrong) that you can change the type of simulation by diving into the simulation object and change the respective setting - that did not work for me on some tests but did do something on others. It's worth having a look, me guesses.

I hope any of this is of help!

Marc