I seem to be making a very simple mistake.

I have created a cube with BOX.
I used the COPY sop to create 3 cubes along x
Used another COPY to create 3 rows of those cubes along z
Used another COPY to create 3 rows of the rows so I have 27 cubes lines up in a grid style fashion.

I then create a grid with extruded thickness for the floor and add the RBD to it as well as set it to static so it will be passive and not be affected by gravity so that it can simply be the solid floor the cubes collide with.

I press play all the COPY'ied cubes fall and act as individual cubes and bounce off the floor and each other freely.

Everything seems to work as I imagined.

The problem is now that I want to bring in a custom model of dice and do the same thing.

So in the geo object I use the file node instead of create a box node and load up my dice poly object.

I hook it up to the chain of COPY sops and it does replace my box cubes with the dice model.

This is where the problem lies.

Well when I press play in the dynamics the cubes do not fall freely as individual cubes but instead seem to act like solid rows of dice.

Also, I have a custom shaped wall that is like a skateboard ramp the way it curves.
I noticed that bullet wants to basically wrap a convex hull around the entire object.
So where normally I was testing on a flat extruded floor which worked as planned... I now see that the custom shaped wall doesn't seem to be able to be accurately calculated because the settings are for primitive shapes or a convex hull.

I am sure all of these are novice mistakes when using dynamics in Houdini.

Just so you know I have been using 3d software since 1995. Maya, Softimage, Max, etc. even Houdini. I just have never really utilized Houdini for dynamics before.

Softimage didn't care what the shape was back in 2005 with the Physx implementation. I could put any shape in and press play and it always just worked and often it near realtime.

Somehow Bullet became the standard and seems to be far less capable than Physx was over 15 years ago.
I came over to Houdini because the Maya side dynamics were also having the same troubles inside of Mash which seem to also use Bullet.

Thank you for any insight you have in helping me try to solve these basic problems which are simply trying to get dice to bounce down a ramp geometry. These are things I used to take for granted in Softimage as they just worked no matter how weird or strange the shapes were. What ever happened to PhysX? It seemed far more advanced than the Bullet solution everyone seems to have conformed to in the last decade.

Bullet is super quick on convex pieces. It looks like your ramp/wall is one solid concave object. There is a switch on the bullet object to calculate collisions for concave objects, however... its slower.
You are using a 3 years old version of houdini and LOTS of work have been done since, so its really hard to tell what tools you got available, I dont have 16.5 installed.

You can also try to use heightfield to represent your ramp as bullet can collide with heightfields efficiently, it has its own limitation but may work in your case

For your dice make sure each of them is separate packed prim ideally with unique name attribute value (Assemble Sop or RBD Configure Sop)
If they are boxes you can override their geometry representation on RBD Configure to Box or you can also use proxy shape to further optimize

Thanks, I will try these out.

Yes I have 16.5 because my Dual Xeon 8 core computer is old enough now that it says the SSE3 instruction set is too old and wont allow the install of 17+. I have a i9 16 Core cpu and Mobo I am assembling. Hopefully I will be able to get it complete by April and use the latest versions.