ground/soil simulation

[gdlk]

Hi!

I want to simulate soil (I don't know if is the right word), something like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=p ... 83fWE#t=93

In the video, I suppose the ground could be done with a btHeightfield or BvhTriangleMesh, so it can be deformate. However, I don't know how make the soil when leave the ground (for example, in the video, when the excavator take the soil and after drop it (from 1m:33s up to 1m:53s)). I see there is some Discrete Element Methods (DEM) to simulate granular matter, however I don't know if they are suitable to real time simulation. Also I was thinking in create some rigid bodies to simulate the soil when is taken, but it would look like rooks instead of soil...

Anyone know about some method or concept to simulate this?, or some guideline or key words to search about this topic?

Thanks!!

[Basroil]

Doesn't look like there's actually any simulation going on, rather just feature subtraction based on collision depth.
One way of doing it:
Basically all you need to do is turn off standard collision and then calculate the intersect area. Remove nodes of the triangle mesh and add new ones around the collision shape. For height maps, just apply a new map value so that the height is lower than the bucket. Do that every once in a while (every frame might be a bit excessive and drop performance), and use a world height based shader configuration.

It won't exactly be realistic, but it's definitely a starting point.


If you want to do the whole granular ground thing, you might need to accept some steep performance drops or consider GPU based solutions, maybe some sort of spherical voxelization in an area around the bucket?

[gdlk]

thanks!

I will search about voxelization (gpu based solutions would be nice!, I would like to simulate in a realistic way the soil but still run in real time), any other key concept/word it could help to search??

Thanks again!