Using TyFlow & 3ds Max to simulate digging dirt, soil, or sand with an Excavator

In this TyFlow tutorial, I show you how to simulate an excavator digging dirt in 3ds Max, and then how to export fbx and alembic (.abc) files into Nvidia Omniverse Create for rendering your animation in real time. I animated a couple free 3d models I found on cgtrader of a wooden cat excavator, and then simply animated the construction machine in 3ds Max. I then edited the ground mesh to separate a piece of the geometry to create a volume for the hole by extruding it. After that I created a birth voxel sim and detected where the tractor claw hit using a physx collider operator, so I could delete those voxel particles.


I then used tyMesher to blob mesh the tyFlow simulation and exported the animated deforming mesh as an alembic file. Using that alembic file (.abc), I used the deformation of the geometry to drive a second tyFlow simulation - where I used the birth intersection operator to create rocks and small debris where the excavator claw hit the ground. Combining these elements together it gives a great look for simulating digging a hole.


Finally, I show how to export our tyFlow particle simulation into Nvidia Omniverse, and how to export all of the animated geometry as an FBX for later conversion into USD for rendering in Nvidia Omniverse Create. For grain simulations, or digging holes of dirt/sand/soil, this tyFlow tutorial will show you how to create a versatile effect for dynamically breaking the ground.


You can download the 3ds Max TyFlow tutorial project file from my Patreon here:   / edstudios  


For more 3ds Max tutorials and tyFlow projects visit:
https://edstudios.ca/motion-graphics-...