Hello all, I'm somewhat new to Houdini and am experiencing an issue that I'm sure I'm just missing something on. I'm doing a simulation in which a metal light pole falls over and deforms a bit on impact. I'm using the method wherein I fracture my model, add hard constraints and turn them into glue constraints once they reach a certain angle upon impact.

My simulation looks good, but when I pipe the dopnet's simulation into a point deform, the resulting model closely resembles the result of the simulation, but it's much flatter. I know that some complex things are happening in the point deform so I'm wondering if anybody with more experience might have any ideas why it's deforming in the wrong way.

I've attached the project file (it takes a while to load due to heavy fracturing) and also thought I'd include screenshots in case anybody can tell just by looking what's going on. Thanks for the help!

it would help helping you if you'd share the .obj asset.

Cheers,

A.

Right you are. My mistake.

The point deform needs to have 3 things. The incoming geometry, a static reference frame for the deforming “cage” mesh and the animated deforming “cage” mesh.

I say cage because the deforming pieces need to have some thickness to then to deform a single surface. You can do it with a single surface but you will probably get similar results to what you have.

1. Do a polyExtrude, just before you pipe your deforming geo into your pointDeform.
2. Make sure that all geometry coming into the pointDeform is unpacked. Or you will get limited deformation around that point.

Hope this helps

Thank you so much for the reply slyGuy!