blueVenom

thanks for the info.

I'm going to keep digging through help docs, the tutorials and see if I can learn more of the workflow. Will post anything I manage to get working.

Sounds great but doesn't make much sense to me as far as how to do it.

I still need to wrap my head around how these things connect. I'm so used to maya where almost anything connects to anything and there is no “spaces” to contend with so you can have access to everything in one place. You still have transform nodes and shape nodes but it seems like Houdini creates extra containers and that's what throws me off. Most nodes also have tabbed attributes which makes things harder to find, I'm used to Maya's vertical approach for most nodes.

Even changing the particle type and size is not intuitive in Houdini at all. There are several settings in different tabs that seem to affect it and they are not categorized well. I think that once I do figure this out I'm going to customize the nodes so I can have everthing in one place.

I'm going to create 2 similar scenes in Maya and houdini and show you the ways the nodes are setup. Maybe then you can explain how I can achieve what I'm trying to because right now it's just making my brain hurt .

Thanks

D

Soothsayer
Well, here is *something*. But I never figured out how to keep a stable volume in grain fluids. They always collapse into a puddle. I don't know if that is a bug a feature or just me.

Another way is to use rigid bodies with perhaps an ODE solver. That is only practical for small sims though.

Cool, thanks.

Yeah I was trying to set up a sim with rigid bodies but wasn't sure where to plug in the nodes and which ones to use. I had a freelancer try and write me a MEL script last year like this for maya where it would instance geometry to a particle sim, and on the first frame it would turn the instance into an object, make it rigid, inherit the values of the particles and then let the rigid solver take over. Unfortunately she didn't get it to work right. I even asked Next Limit about scripting a custom emitter in RealFlow to emit rigids but there is no way to combine solvers in RF.

I thought maybe in Houdini you can crate a series of objects to act as sand grains, make them rigids and then instance them in some special way to a particle system where they only pick up the initial values of the particles, i.e. velocity, direction, and then the rigid solver takes over. Being it's sand the objects would be quite small so you would only need a small number of faces on each. Either way, sand is going to simulate slowly but it would be nice to at least get some type of functioning node tree going.

Thanks for the file though, I'll give it a look. If you have any ideas relating to the above let me know. The project I'm working on doesn't have mass amounts of sand. Just certain parts would turn into sand and I wouldn't mind running several different sims, caching them, and then rendering them separately if needed.