Thinking Particles 4 for pre-baked physics

VFX
1

Hey guys!
Allow my to blatantly re-post what I wrote on cgtalk: :slight_smile:

I’m evaluating Thinking Particles 4 for generating prebaked destruction animations of city environments for realtime playback and I have a few questions. If this is not the right place to ask, I apologize - please redirect me in that case.

My questions/concerns:
[ol]
[li]The SC physics simulation feels kind of ‘sticky’ whereas physX behaves more as I expected.
[/li]I have been following this tutorial: http://www.cgfeedback.com/cgfeedbac...hread.php?t=426 and it feels like by just using a SC node the individual fragments stick together a while like they are connected through a breakable/deformable joint.
The particles also stick to other neutron deflectors that are part of the SC.
[li]While TP4 seems really powerful at simulating rigid bodies (and simple deformables) I haven’t seen any cloth/rope physics done with it. Is it entirely unsuitable for that kind of simulation or has it been done before?
[/li][li]A lot of the (commercial) training material available seems to revolve around using TP for actual particle and special FX simulation and not particularly physics/destruction simulation pipelines. The movie 2012 has proven that it’s suitable for destruction, but is there any production-level training material available yet?
[/li][li]TP4 is still pretty new. Has anybody used it in a game production enviroment for pre-baked physics before and can share his experiences?
[/li][/ol]

Thanks a lot for your help!
-Sascha

2
  1. Your link is broken but it could be possible that you’re still using voxels, try face-collision. It will be a bit slower but much more accurate and no more sticking.
  2. There is no cloth/deforming meshes solver yet in TP. You will have to do it outside from tp or try to fake it somehow.
  3. There is a training DVD from Joe Scarr which might be a quite unknown but it’s very good material and worth a look: https://sites.google.com/site/m3dgptpprojects/home/tp4-projects/dvd-projects/tp4_dvd-1

I hope this was helpful :):

3

I think original post is :
http://www.cgfeedback.com/cgfeedback/showthread.php?t=426

4

Thanks for you help!

I couldn’t figure out how to change the collision type, other than using physX. ShapeCollision seems to always use voxels.
Did I miss a switch somewhere?

5

The face collision “switch” is built in the voxelgrid spinner… it’s a bit counter-intuitive but anyways…

That’s what is written in the documentation:

Important when you set Voxel Grid to 0 (zero) a true box collision is assumed, when set to 1 (one) the mesh itself is used to test the collision to the nearest surface point. The latter mode is much more accurate but it also uses more CPU computing time so it is slower.

So if you set the Voxelgrid to 1 it will perform a true face collision.

edit: be aware that there are two shape collision operators in TP4, the old “ShapeCollision” and the new “SC”, you will have to use the new one :wink: