Can I make solid particles, like sand through an hourglass?

Phoenix General
1

Hi all

Version 3 is looking pretty awesome! Congrats on the dev team and beta testers!

Liquids, smoke fire etc are awesome, but could I use Phoenix to make something more solid with particles, for example sand falling in a hourglass? Or sand falling from a bag, with various obstacles in the way?
mParticles is just way too slow for this sort of thing

2

Hey, thanks a lot! Hope it’s getting better :slight_smile:

Only thing I can think of regarding the particles is to use the Liquid solver, disable any viscosity and surface tension and you should get exactly a sandy behavior of the liquid particles. Then you can render them using the Phoenix particle shader instead of meshing them into a liquid mesh. Maybe something like that will work?

Cheers!

3

Thanks for the reply Svetlin, is it possible you can slap a small example video together that shows this kind of behaviour you are talking about please?
Anything simple, maybe sand falling onto the ground, with a cube or sphere in the way?

4

Sure, just a sec.

5

Here you go :slight_smile:

6

Cool thanks Svetlin! Can I make it to accumalate into a pile or heap on the ground surface? …and onto the surface of that 1st box, so eventually when it gets high enough, it will spill over the sides of the 1st box?

Also, when it hits the ground plane, it seems to slide too much to the other side of the container, so it should be more errr, static so it makes a heap at the bottom?

So more of a “cone” shapped heap at the bottom. Currently it looks like sand, but behaves like liquid.

…oh and will I have enough cells in the Demo version to copy what you did in this short tut?

7

I guess you could enable wetting and use the stickiness of the wetmap, but in order for it to accumulate in pile you’d have to maybe change the hidden ‘reflprec’ parameter to a small value different than zero. However, it probably won’t ever behave like a real sand because it’s just a hack to make the liquid solver less liquid-like :slight_smile:

Cheers!

8

Thanks for the info and help Svetlin

9

My pleasure! Once we get over the basics, I guess we’d be able to expand into more exotic solver types :slight_smile: Please share if you want to achieve any other interesting effects.

Cheers!

10

now thats funny. this is nearly exactly what i’am try’n to archive at the moment. smt like blown sand. I try’d to get there with foam, cause i thought to get a “wet clumpy sand” effect with B2B Interaction, but wasn’t realy satisfying.
Great tutorial! will try it that way now. :sunglasses:

11

Ah, yes - foam with B2B would be a bit weird, because the interaction both repels and pulls the particles together.

12

Cool hack :slight_smile:

I testet the instancer with phoenix. Didn’t thought it would work but it does!
That way we can have costum made sand grains with vray materials. :slight_smile:

13

Any plans to create a solver just for sand, gravel, little derbies ?

14

We do have it mind, but right now it’s far from the top of the list :slight_smile: