I was playing around with the idea of making an air dancer/inflatable man in Houdini as a small learning project. I thought I could use a POP Fan wind to get the air moving inside it but I couldn't find a way to make the cloth collide/block the airflow so I ended up just making it the simple way (i.e giving up on making a wind tunnel and just having a wind force that doesn't get channeled by the geometry but rather after it globally in a cone shape).
What would be a way to make the sim work like on example 2?
From my understanding I'd need a smoke sim interacting with a an animated cloth sim which should also be influenced by that smoke sim, so we quickly end up with an unsolvable problem of a snake eating it's own tail.
As a beginner I'm curious if it's doable somehow.
My nodetree:
Edited by medieval_cortex - March 7, 2022 15:31:25
You can place a smoke generator inside, and use the smoke dancer as an animated collision source. It seems silly to simulate another layer where the smoke affects the vellum. That wouldn't happen in the real world, the smoke would just move around it. But if you like watching paint dry, extract the velocity field from the smoke simulation and reapply it to the vellum source, and then re-simulate smoke with the revised collider. My guess is that wouldn't change the vellum sim very much, and you could probably emulate that just by adding noise on the first pass.
Enivob You can place a smoke generator inside, and use the smoke dancer as an animated collision source. It seems silly to simulate another layer where the smoke affects the vellum. That wouldn't happen in the real world, the smoke would just move around it. But if you like watching paint dry, extract the velocity field from the smoke simulation and reapply it to the vellum source, and then re-simulate smoke with the revised collider. My guess is that wouldn't change the vellum sim very much, and you could probably emulate that just by adding noise on the first pass.
I think you didn't quite understand what I wanted, that smoke should have much higher velocity. Basically I want to simulate air flow inside the structure to get more realistic movements. In the real world the whole thing is driven by a single fan at the bottom, and all the air blown by that fan goes inside the structure, not around it. This result in quite a different behavior from the air dancer since air is pushed inside it, it wouldn't collapse as much, and the arms would move completely differently than with a standard wind sim.
So really in my post you can think of smoke as air flow pushing the structure from the inside.
My idea wasn't about adding visible smoke inside him but now that I see it I kind of love it though!
Edited by medieval_cortex - March 8, 2022 09:46:22
