Hi, I'm new to this forum.
I am trying to set up a system to simulate falling money. lots of it. The thing is I am struggling to get adequate results in Maya. I need the individual instances to float/twirl correctly and I need them to have soft body/cloth properties. I am told Houdin has great particle tools. Can anybody give me more info? Is it worth starting the long road to learning a new package? ANd if so is Houdini the best for this kind of thing?
Thanks
B

You don't mention your time frame, but assuming it's a typical work or school time frame and this isn't just something you're doing on your own for it's own sake, then I'd have to be a realist and suggest that taking on an entirely new animation package, especially one as powerful(and potentially deep) as Houdini, might be too much to bite off *for this particular project*.

Having said that, to answer your specific questions:

The particle tools are indeed very powerful. They will(as always) take a while to learn the subtleties, but they give you access to a *lot*.

In the current release version of Houdini there are no built-in softbody tools, but that's OK because frankly if someone asked me to do what you describe, I wouldn't dream of throwing that mess at a cloth simulator then coming back weeks later. The next release of Houdini, in alpha now, has some mighty dynamics tools, including cloth. However, how I would approach something like you describe(off the top of my head, caveat caveat caveat… ) would be to use particle systems, but for the closer bills use some clever tricks such as basing deformations of the geometry on rate of speed, torque, etc. That sort of thing is very easy to do in Houdini, once you grasp the paradigms. I'm pretty confident I could come up with a range of motions and deformations that could be tied to motion and it would look pretty damned realistic. Cloth sim wouldn't be my first choice for the behaviour of relatively stiff paper tumbling in the wind, anyway…lots of compute time spent for something that wouldn't ripple like a flag or collide meaningfully with anything.

Is it worth the long road? Absolutely, because I've never met anyone that gave Houdini a chance(and didn't expect it to act like every other package out there) who didn't come away woth a much more powerful grasp of the FX biz. Access to the behind the scenes stuff is tremendously enlightening. However, is it worth rushing into it for this job in the hope there'll be an instant button in Houdini to do precisely what you describe? Probably not, unless you're a really fast learner or the time frame is relaxed.

Cheers,

J.C.

The particles cant help you here.
I think the answer of your question is to use combination of rigid and softBodies+springs applied to your coins.

The rigidBody solver will bring you nice dynamic control - sliding, bouncing, good collisions, etc. The softBody stuff will give you the soft deformation of the coins.

On top of that you can add and particle instances on background to fill-up the screen with falling money

You can try and Houdini's DOPs, but they are on early development stage. The RBD collision detection is too bad for now.

He's doing paper money, not coins. Coins don't float.

I have no idea why you say particles can't help him.

“Soft Deformation of coins”?

DOPs aren't available except to those invited to join the alpha program.

“Some Lurker”, indeed.

J.C.

heh, my bad, somehow i got the impression he is going to animate coins, not a paper money … too tired these days

Sorry about the spamming.

The studio where i'm working on is in the alpha program.
You talked about DOPs and i just continued.

some
The RBD collision detection is too bad for now.

Didn't Jason do a sim with 25,000 peanuts and a paddle wheel, how much better does it need to be?

I've seen some nice results with the existing Resistance POP setups for things like leaves ..

hey there, sa dude,

how close do u get to the money?

im also from sa, so if u have any urgent problems, let me know

i work at the refinery on houdini, ill never use another 3d tool :-)

anyways

u been using it long?

aracid