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Home Resources Software specific 3DS Max
ThinkingParticles sand solver

ThinkingParticles sand solver

by CGP Staff
November 24, 2014
Reading Time: 1 min read
14

Spanish artist Eloi Andaluz has created a system to simulate sand in 3DS Max using ThinkingParticles. A video example, free tutorial and accompanying scene can be found on AndVFX’s website.

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14 Comments
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Markus.S
10 years ago

Nice sim and rendering but way to bouncy for sand.

Reply
eloi
Reply to  Markus.S
10 years ago

You can adjust the bouncines on the rbd pass in tp. Decreasing ERP in Physics properties. I found the bounciness is good looking, but I totally agree that for a realistic sand look bounciness needs to be much less.

Reply
Juang3d
10 years ago

I’m curious… can’t this be donw with particle flow? Or particle flow + krakatoa magma?

(Honest question here…)

Cheers.

Reply
nickolay411
10 years ago

@Juang3d

This would be a good exercise for achieving something similar with particle flow and stoke! I’ll see if I can whip something out in the next day or two.

Reply
Juang3d
10 years ago

Can I ask you to try it without stoke?
Of course you can try it with whatever you want, but stoke is an extra plugin hehehe, we have Krakatoa to render millions of particles, but we don’t have stoke, maybe it’s possible to do it just with Pflow, after all the final particles are not physical, but I’m not sure if a particles simulation can be used as field for other particles simulation in PFlow.
So maybe you are right and stoke is mandatory.

Cheers and thanks for trying!

Reply
eloi
10 years ago

Hi, yes, I think this is possible with pflow box3 or kind off. In this example I use only Thinking Particles, first to dont use any other plugin, and second because I dont have anything else right now on the company. Saving PRT passes with krakatoa and meshing with frost I will be able to render unlimited number of objects (This examples have 4.5M particles and use 24Gb of ram).
Stoke can be also a very good solution for create the “detail pass”, but on this examples I “detach” some of the particles from the main velocity field following to go to an independent group with collision and gravity based on density, maybe with stoke +magama this will be possible

Reply
Juang3d
10 years ago

It could be interesting to see if this is possible with plain Pflow since all boxes are included in max now and avoid the usage of any plugin at all.

Just if you have time and you want to 🙂

Cheers and thanks!

Reply
nickolay411
10 years ago

@Juang3d and eloi.

You guys are both right. It is possible with box 3 but it would be pretty damn slow to update. 2 systems. First system is the low to mid res sim. The second system will have to make a data op which uses an input proxy system as a field sampling particle velocities and orientations whatever from your sim flow. Inside this data op you can build in what eloi described where you sample the density and use that to detach particles to another sim or some sort of fake collision using a deflection function. I’ll give it a go today.

Cheers

Reply
Anselm von Seherr-Thoss
10 years ago

Has been done before in Box#3 but that’s not the point. It just shows another and a very nice way, I might add 🙂 Eloi does a great job at utilizing TP what it is not intentionally used for like motion graphics with his MapTransfer and RadiusEffector e.g.

Ansi

Reply
Juang3d
10 years ago

@nickolay411
Let us know if you achieve anything, I’m really curious about this, I had a project where I had to simulate flour and it was a pain, with this the problem is nearly solved.

@Anselm von Seherr-Thoss
TP is not an option, for me at least, their new subscription only based model makes it out of the scope completely, like any other package that has a subscrition only model, I won’t “rent” software that will leave me with nothing when the time is due and that won’t let me own my complete work unless I pay them more…
Eloi is a “crack”, that’s for sure 🙂

Cheers

Reply
Jefferson Lim
10 years ago

Cool looking sand eloi!
I did a somewhat similar setup back then for pflow box3 but I never got to tweak it past looking like a sandy paste 😀
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zUqb4lVfkU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eU1SZ7bNtZU
I sampled nearest velocities on that setup.

Reply
nickolay411
10 years ago

@Juang3d

Below is what I came up with with just using pflow at its current state no plugins. Sorry it’s just a playblast. The method is similar to Jeff’s method just sampling nearest velocities. I also put experimented with using a density gradient normal and running loose particles down it as a ‘fake’ surface. It’s slow but kinda working. 🙂

I’m already onto the next iteration. Hopefully I can show more soon.

http://nickolation.com/tests/pf_Sand_test.mov

Cheers,
N

Reply
James Kurt
Reply to  nickolay411
10 years ago

Can you send me the scene file me awesome if you could 😀

Reply
Juang3d
10 years ago

Awesome guys, please make a tuto or post the scene when you finish it, it looks great 🙂

Cheers.

Reply

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