Convert to grains SPH solver?

[mightcouldb1]

I'm working on a sand effect, using rbd velocity to drive particles and I cam across something interesting on the sidefx forum.

You can turn off the Pressure forces on the Particle Fluid Solver, Turn off Collisions, and turn on integrate orientations, then add a Gas Particle Forces to the last green input of the particle fluid solver.

Then in the particle fluid object check the "Treat as Grains". This will switch to an entirely repulsive model with the stiff springs you expect from sand. You likely need to incresae your max substeps to 100, turn on the RK Fehlberg integration, and reduce the error tolerance while you are at it.

I hope there will be a hidden shelf to make this setup straightforward for H10.

I've also seen that there is a Sand Solver, but there isn't great documentation on it, and I can't get it to work.

Has anyone used either of these methods to simulate sand? Or should I stick with RBDs?

[Macha]

I've tried to make sand quite a few times and found it very very hard to get right. The sand solver doesn't work well, in fact somebody somewhere mentioned that SESI doesn't recommend using it. Grains are also very tricky to finetune and more often than not the whole thing exploded on me.

It depends on your effect but the best I came up with was a combination of metaballed surfaces that emit and react with particles.