How to simulate SAND in Blender 3.1?
Why Blender Stack Exchange recommends it
Blender Stack Exchange users link it when someone needs to simulate or render sand or very large particle counts with the Mantaflow plus point cloud approach introduced in Blender 3.1.
Recommended by 2 people across 3 different months, 2022 to 2022.
What it is
A roughly 30-minute Blender 3.1 tutorial by Bad Normals on simulating sand grains using a Mantaflow liquid simulation rendered as point clouds with geometry nodes. It builds an hourglass scene covering simulation setup, outflow, sand setup, materials and final polish, and notes the method's limitations.
What people said
Recommends Blunder · 2022-04 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Simulating Sand in Blender”
In Blender 3.1 Cycles can now render point clouds with geometry nodes. The mantaflow liquid simulation can be used to create sand as shown here: [this video]
Recommends Yousuf Chaudhry · 2022-06 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Adjust (crop) object on plane”
@jayjo To be honest, your sand looks pretty good... Check out these tutorials (or watch any of the thousands available on YouTube for free) [LINK] [this video] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]
Recommends Blunder · 2022-09 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “best way of dealing with O(100K) exact positions”
I found it again. Here is an example video How to simulate SAND in Blender 3.1? [this video] It uses the new *Point Cloud* feature that came with 3.1 and a *Manta Flow Liquid* simulation to create the sand with a few million particles. Hope that helps.
Cites vklidu · 2022-06 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Submerging An Object From Ground”
There is more ways to achieve something like that. Usually Particle System is used. In some cases also cold smoke or fluid could work even better than particles because for something like sand or dust you would have to use a lot of particles ... it would be probably quite crazy to calculate :) Particles I didn't convert them to Rigid Body sim it would be more accurate, but a lot heavier to calculate. To let those here to collide with Colliders Deflect > enable Size Deflect To Collide particles between each other Force Field Settings > enable Self Effect and under Type1 > Force > Strength 1 (but animate the value from zero to one otherwise you get shock wave :). enable also FallOff > Max Dist