Hi,
I'm trying to create an animated short clip where a skeleton is climbing out a grave. It's a very cliche hand coming out first type of affair then the skeleton sits and then stands up and eventually jumps out of the grave with the earth shifting in a semi-convincing by stylized way. My main software package is Maya however I feel like Houdini would be far more suited to this kind of effect with RBD fracturing and grains etc. As a needy newbie, I'd humbly like to ask for some advice on how to achieve this kind of effect and if anyone knows of a suitable training course which covers something similar with it being transferrable back to maya for final rendering. I've seen some cool looking stuff done with Grains but I can't seem to find a way to transfer the results to Maya?

Appreciate any assistance anyone can offer and best regards to all.

Sounds like a job for Vellum grains. You could make an extruded rectangle above the grave and fill it with vellum grains. Then with a vellum constraints node (set to glue) you can glue everything together with a certain strength and break threshold. You can then wire it into another vellum glue that glues individual clusters together which can be generated with the cluster node. This way, you get a nice mixture of bigger clumps of dirt and small particles falling off. Of course you can add a lot more to this, but i'd say this is the right direction for what you want. Once that is set up correctly, you can go all out with your personal vision for the shot. RBD is not really the way to go unless the skeleton is breaking out of a stone grave and thereby breaking it.

There are loads of tutorials on vellum grains on Youtube, so I suggest you start by watching some of those

Thanks Robbert. I thought that grains would be the way to but is there anyway to convert them to geo so i can export them out to Maya?

sutcliffe
Thanks Robbert. I thought that grains would be the way to but is there anyway to convert them to geo so i can export them out to Maya?

You can surface them using the Particle Fluid Surface SOP.

You can also export them as points with pscale in case you have a lot of them and want to keep rendering as grains

Exporting as .abc should work, just don't try to load them directly in Maya, Maya seems like it gave up on supporting .abc properly, especially particles

But if renderer of your choice can render .abc directly as proxy or standin geo it should work

Or you should also be able to load particles from .abc using Bifrost