I'm trying to create a pile of sand or earth but it's hard to get anything convincing. So far I have tried:

-Copy SOP and metaballs (fast and easy but looks a bit meeh)

-Particle fluids similar to the dough in the fluid tutorials (very hard to tweak and very slow)

I noticed there are sand solver DOPs and sand objects but the helpfiles have no examples so I have very little idea on how to set it up. Does anybody know how to link these nodes together?

Any ideas would be greatly welcomed.

Are you trying to create a model of a pile of earth? Or, are you going to simulate it somehow?

If you're trying to model something, you might want to start with a simple model (some kind of distorted grid) and add some texture maps or procedural shaders with displacement or bump as a base. Then, you could scatter points on that geometry and copy stamp rocks, pebbles, debris, etc on that surface. This will keep your geometry light and controllable.

I've never used the sand solver, so I'm sorry I can't offer any suggestions there.

I'm trying to simulate it. It doesn't have to be detailed (no individual sands of grain) but it needs to behave somewhat like sand. So, if it flows and can be scooped without completely collapsing, that would be ideal.

Sand flows pretty much like a fluid except that it doesn't bounce so much and has a natural stability so I'm running into problems when using pfluids.

Perhaps I could do a rigid-body sim, and use the particlefluid sop to skin the thing…

I haven't tried to create a pile of earth before, but here's a basic example how to set up the sand solver. Hope it helps!

Dan

Thanks danBode, that's quite illuminating.

It turns out to be quite slow and some weird things happen too but now I see that it is just voxels, so I will try volumes!

The rbd road seems most promising so far but it's still very slow.