I’m going to be brief: I was wondering if somebody here knows good software for large rigid body simulations? I’m currently in the situation of having to simulate an object, shattered into many shards, breaking. We are talking about something like 50k objects and around 1 million faces in total. Blenders simulation tools are abysmal (different gripe of mine), but do you have any ideas about software that could handle that at least somewhat? I have looked at addons and external simulation engines like nexus and hurricane, both pretty new, but somehow, I’m only finding engines for particles, fluids, hair and soft body simulations. Has rigid body sim gotten too boring, what am I missing here?
I think… Houdini ? I’m not a big fan of it… if they offered a free version for learning with no watermarks and silly limitations .. - maybe I would tried harder to stay on that boat.. but the apprentice - free - is a joke, in my opinion - “full featured”.. but… a joke. - but it’s an amazing piece of software - the most powerful and FULLY procedural tool ever created - (blender.. is still a lot far away.. )
I think Blender hasn’t anything in the rigid body sims compartment that can be .. even remotely compared to other software at the moment… - in geometry nodes, I mean, because all the rest is - obsolescent and left to die - .
Yes, there isn’t anything really usable in Blender at the moment for serious Rigid Body simulations, sadly. Hope they will fill the gap, but at the time even soft-body/hair sims are still experimental.. and the software is improving a lot with every version, but we are still a lot far from the true and 100% TOTAL procedural workflow of software like Houdini.
I can recommend NVIDIA Omniverse Isaac Sim for Rigid Body Simulation - but you need a RTX GPU for this. It is not a classic DCC, it is a developer platform. It requires coding skills to do big stuff, but can do a lot with the GUI already.
Thank you, that seems interesting. Unfortunately, after looking at their github page it seems like the system requirements are batshit insane. It requires Windows 11 AND at least a RTX 4080? That’s fucked.
(Sorry for the profanities, my mind is just blown)
@SterlingRoth Thank you, both options seem interesting, I just have to look up how much effort it would be to set up a sim scene with these two. I do know a bit of coding still, but I obviously don’t want to have to write hundreds of LOC just to setup a scene.
Other then Houdini and on keeping it all within Blender, HiPhyEngine (https://hiphyengine.github.io/) maybe worth a look.
It does all the other stuff along with rigid bodies (they call it Affine Body). No idea if it can handle the object/face count you are talking about. Or even if it can, Blender may have a problem with a scene that large.
Either way, you can get a 6 month trial version, so won’t cost you anything to find out.
Add-ons apart.. I think we also need something in blender itself (like Houdini.. that has.. EVERYTHING - as full core application - ) . I suppose that the developers are aware of this.. and that we’ll see cool new things with every version.. I love Blender a lot and .. I’m always waiting to see it .. evolving.
5.2 Set/Get Geometry Bundles are the amazing gift they gave me after the Simulation Zone Node introduction .. <3 I’m waiting for 5.3.. 6.0… And if I’ll ever will gain a $1 with Blender.. 0,1 will be always yours <3.
If you get paid for it and can offset the cost, then Houdini is your safest bet.
Shattering and simulating an object breaking is a rather trivial task, you can learn and do that in several hours to a day. (fine-tuning and art-direction will be the gist of it).
You can test it out before paying with the free Apprentice version.
However, 50000 shards will probably need 32GB of RAM, even without glue constraints and the resulting cache will be more than 15 GB big.
I am not very confident that a GPU solver can handle that (all at once).
Fracturing an object into 50k pieces will be the most painful part of the whole process (don’t do it at once, use several passes).
For reference, I recently blew up an ~1 million polygon Spaceship into 12k pieces, with glue constraints and other more complex switch constraints and it took 12 minutes to simulate 200 frames on an older Ryzen7 8core. Exporting it out into alembic might take another 12.
If you’ve got the $$$ and the RAM its perfectly doable on standard consumer hardware.
Oh it does? Alright then it might work on my RTX 3080 TI too. I thought it wouldn’t, since they listed the 4080 as a minimum requirement and I thought that would also specifiy only the 40xx generation and later. Well then I just have to consider whether I want to upgrade to Windows 11 (or dual boot Linux).
12 minutes for 200 frames? That’s so much less than what I was expecting, that’s incredibly reasonable. The object actually already is fractured (still in the form of one object, seperating by loose parts takes some time but not too long), so simulation is my only concern. I’m still rocking my humble 16 gigs of ram tho, that might get difficult (I didn’t upgrade my ram before it got more expensive than gold ).
I hate to be the bringer of bad news, but separating 50000 loose parts might take a while. Its a single core operation.
I once tried to strip a Star Destroyer of its greeble and it took more than 10 minutes (until Blender crashed). Never tried an separation operation of that magnitude again.
Either way, your 16GB of RAM (which is more like 12 if you subtract what the Windows uses) is the most concerning bottleneck you face trying to simulate all these pieces, no matter the software.
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