Optimized Sand Simulation

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#1

If I wanted to make a realistic sand simulation, what would be the most optimized way of doing so, while also keeping the features of real sand?

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#2

You can’t realistically “simulate” sand since that would be a pain. If you want sand particles then I suggest ParticleEmitters or Beams.

#3

If you mean like Powdertoy or this roblox game

then yes you could.

They’re complicated cellular automata. Which you can multithread (roblox parallel lua).

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#4

I think you could, it would just need to be optimized well

#5

No I don’t mean 2-d. I’m talking about a 3-d simulation

#6

What do you want to use the sand for?

#7

So you can build with it, but the gravity is realistic

#8

Like in minecraft where sand blocks fall down if there is nothing below them?

#9

No not blocky, I mean like actual sand particles that have realistic physics, that you can scoop

#10

Too taxing. Computers aren’t powerful enough to realistically simulate water vapour for fog, so there’s no way they’d be able to physically simulated literally millions of grains of sand.

#11

Could you give a more detailed description of what you’re trying to achieve?

Do you want a beach game where you can build sandcastles?

#12

Could mesh deformation be used instead, so players could “shape” the sand

#13

You could use roblox’s Terrain for that

#14

There a feature deform terrain in real time?

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#15

Yea there is, multiple games use it

#16

Would it possible to convert what ever part is subtracted from the terrain into the player holding a mesh that can be deformed, so players can pick up sand and place it else where

#17

The terrain is a cubic grid where every block stores a number and material type. So you can store those values and recreate them somewhere else.

But unless you can perfectly recreate how the terrain makes a mesh from that information you can’t make a player hold it as a mesh.
(also each cube in the terrain is about the size of the player, so the player would need a rather large scoop to be able to hold anything that resembles anything)

#18

You could probably just let a bucket of some sort fill up by resizing a cylinder with sand material inside of it and making it smaller when substracting sand again

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#19

are your commissions open, i can pay 20,000 robux for the system I need if you can do it

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