Hello everyone,

I made it a personal goal to learn Houdini in my senior year of school. Here is a WIP on a project i am working on. This is my first time doing fracturing and ridged bodies in Houdini. Any critique is welcome.

http://vimeo.com/38783603 [vimeo.com]

As for the smoke and dust I am a little stumped on how to proceed. I tired using pyro effects however the simulation takes way to long or crashes when interacting with so many ridged bodies. Any suggestions on how I can proceed?

James S

Looks pretty good so far. How about using some cookies first to make larger chunks that stay together, as now every last piece shatters almost the same. Use the large chunks as static objects until just before impact, then switch it to rbd objects.

Also if your having problems with fluids due to pieces, how about sprite particles for the dust?
Sprites still have their place in effects. You could use sprites for the distant pieces, then only use the pieces close to the camera as emission pieces for fluids.

Here is a file to create particle births from impact positions. It's pretty self-explanitory and straight forward (as long as you are comfy with expressions).

The copysop copy number parameter and the point sop position data are the meat and veg of the effect.

EDIT: How many pieces are in your scene? I had a play after reading this, and with 2000 pieces all as emission objects seemed to sim really nice and speedy. Topped out at about 5.8Gb of ram.

I can upload a flipbook if you like.

really nice.

my 2 cents.
slow down the animation a bit to give the feeling of heavy rock
right now(personal opinion)…it looks like your structure is small due to the speed of the objects falling.
if you do not want to add steps you could just decrease the gravity value

other than that very nice work
waiting to see the final

Thanks for the feedback guys!

Sami: Totally agree with you on the speed of the rocks. I will decrease the Gravity value.

ragupasta: Thanks for the example file on emitting particles. I will check that out. The sprites sounds like a good solution for creating the bulk of the dust effect. How would you handle trailing smoke like the rock on the left of the picture below? Would you instence an emitter to random RBD objects and just emite patical sprites as well from those objects?

EDIT: Also what are cookies?

Yeah just use the chunks as emission geometry for the particles.

Cookies are geometry booleans. Good for all sorts, especially seperating pieces that may need to be static objects and such.