particles self collition - sand simulation

how do i make particles collide with eachother? im planning to simulate digging in sand. currently i have a particle system set to emit objects, all though i dont think this is going to work cause i want the sand to be close to real scale…

is there a better way to make a sand simulation? lets say you wanted to animate a truck driving on a beach, and you could see the sand flush to the sides of the wheels, and afterwards being able to see the wheeltracks, and also the thread pattern in the sand.

You should take a look at the molecular addon, as far as I understand the particle system in Blender cannot simulate collisions between particles.

im having trouble installing the addon…

it looks great and i can do most of what i wanted with that addon, but is there a better way to simulate sand?

I’m not completely sure, but I dare to say no. Until the particle system in Blender gets redesigned, there’s no better way to do this. Not in Blender at least.

If you can’t get it to work I’d recommend you to write to Pyroevil or to try another software.

HI!
For your first scenario (the sand piling up) you could try FLUID particles… these WILL collide with each other, however, it may take some really hacky manipulation of the particle settings to make them seem like “sand” rather than liquid… also carefully tweaking the particle sizes and iteration levels (+ sub frames) to get the desired result, may help somewhat.

however its worth mentioning that this would be a really heavy duty way of animating such a thing… like hammering a picture hook in with a sledge hammer.
there are methods you can use to approximate the “digging” action, but of course with much lower graphical fidelity.

for the second problem I would consider using dynamic paint to displace the “ground” mesh to show the tyre tracks / footsteps / whatever…

there are a lot of tricks you can use to make the displacement more appealing, such as different draw modes on the textures (using things like subtractive/additive textures to have inverted displacement around the foot (or tyre) while using regular whitemaps to displace the sand where the footprints are shown, its also possible to do things like blurring the dynamic paintmaps to have the footprints “blur” over time, thereby making the footprints look more natural (and less “hard”))

the downside to using displaced dynamic paintmaps is the geometry needs to be substantial in order to appear correctly…