Digging a hole in the ground with a shovel.

[Anonymous]

Greetings,

We're setting up a scene where a worker digs into the ground with a shovel and removes a chunk of earth. The whole scene needs to be exported to Unity in the end.

But first I need some guidance on the best way to achieve the effect of ground being dig into. I only have the most basic of knowledge when it comes to dynamic simulations. 

So my question is: Is this something that should/can be done in nParticles, Bullet, Bifrost or something else entirely? 

My experiments with nParticles have been a bit erratic; and I haven't been able to discover how to make geometry animate and be a rigid body in Bullet. 

Any direction will be appreciated. Thank you.

[Grahame_Fuller]

Hello,

I can't give you an outright answer, and I do not have any deep experience with nParticles or Bullet in Maya, so consider this more as high-level advice rather than specific "how to" steps.

The new Bifrost Extension does have an MPM solver that can do granular materials such as sand and snow, which could be a good starting point.

One thing that will be a challenge is the shovel — shovel blades tend to be very thin so  the simulation will probably need very high resolution to prevent the dirt falling through it. In turn, this means lots of memory and long computation times, so try to keep the simulated region as small as possible and use a regular mesh for the ground as close to the hole as you can.

Good luck with your experiments. Feel free to post about your progress, and then maybe someone can give more specific advice.

I hope that helps,

gray

[Anonymous]

Thank you.

I'll definitely give the Granular simulation a go. I'm quite relieved to see that they have a 2018 download for it.

[Anonymous]

So the granular simulation might work. It's quite slow, but it's giving better results.

Now the question is: How do I get an alembic out to Unity?

The 'Compute and Cache to Disk' doesn't seem to work with the new Graph Editor version. - And I can not find the Meshing option in the shape node. Has that been changed for the new version?

An other experiment I have been working on, is using nCloth with a shattered plane. It's not pretty, but is kinda gets the idea across. 

[Anonymous]

Hi everyone. 

So here is the latest update:

I'm sort of at a loss on how to get the mpm simulation out of Maya. Or even make it actual geometry. The file_cashe node does not seem to work with mpm. 

Also Playblast is not working. Not sure if it's a general problem or a Bifrost problem yet.

So, I gave Bifrost a rest for a bit and went back to nParticles with the help of the following tutorial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8e_6Ha43kU

It still mud (or porridge) at the moment, but it's fast and it's transferable to Unity.

[J450NP13]

@Anonymous What are your parameters for all the nodes?