rd1010 Posted September 5, 2009 Share Posted September 5, 2009 I have an associate who is in the engineering field and he has asked me about using houdini for simulations to do testing such as to see how the building would withstand a high temperature fire or hurricane, things of that nature... I'm mainly a 3d artist and don't do much animation myself so I told him I would ask here to see if it has potential for this sort of thing.. I know houdini offers real world physics to some extent but could it be used for this sort of thing.. maybe in combination with some other software package? Any advice / info on this is appreciated. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pagefan Posted September 5, 2009 Share Posted September 5, 2009 It's unlikely even if houdini used real world physics since houdini isn't certified for this kind of stuff...Anyway, you could use vex/python etc to do calculations on geometry if you want Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rd1010 Posted September 5, 2009 Author Share Posted September 5, 2009 (edited) Interesting.. so its probably possible to use it to create the visuals based off calculations then but it would require a programmer to use python (most likely an engineer who is very familiar with this sort of thing) to calculate the real world physics, I'll look into it further as I'm guessing there are some physics engines that could be used for this sort of thing. Edited September 5, 2009 by rd1010 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
petz Posted September 5, 2009 Share Posted September 5, 2009 houdini isn´t meant to be a structural analysis package so NO you can´t use it for such things. the reason for using real world dimensions and to some degree physics within houdini is that dynamic simulations should look believable, but that´s far from being an accurate simulation needed for any kind of structural analysis. if your friend is working as an engineer he should know the difference! you can use python for a kind of glue between houdini and other programs but writing your own complete FEM solver which can handle nonlinear dynamics is not that easy no matter if you are using python, or any other programming language. petz Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rd1010 Posted September 5, 2009 Author Share Posted September 5, 2009 (edited) Right.. so I understand now houdini can't be used to actually do the simulations but it could be used to give the graphical output of simulations generated in another software, from the way I understand it.. just doesn't sound too easy to do though.. I think the person I talked to was referring to this in using the graphical output power of houdini to better show the simulations visually. Edited September 6, 2009 by rd1010 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
petz Posted September 6, 2009 Share Posted September 6, 2009 afaik most simulation packages are shipped with a postprocessor for showing the results of simulations but anyway, visualizing data with houdini shouldn´t be to hard. well,... depending on the kind of data. usually you have some ascii output files that you can easily read in with the help of python or through chops. for visualizing scalars and vectors you have more or less readymade functions within houdini. if you need the gradient of scalars for vectorfields or some streamline generation in sops-land vex or python is your friend. if you need even more than that use one of the thousend open source visualization tools available or get your hands dirty implementing vtk in houdini through python. petz Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rd1010 Posted September 6, 2009 Author Share Posted September 6, 2009 Thanks.. yeah I think its something where he wants to give a really dramatic, realistic visualization of potential things to occur to a building based on events so I'll pass this info along. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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